Reconfiguring Families and Intimacies In East Asia: Gender, Care, and the Politics of Demographic Crisis

This session examines the reconfiguration of families and intimacies in East Asia amid intensifying demographic crisis discourse. It invites papers that analyze how marriage, childbirth, parenting, intergenerational relations, care, household formation, and intimate life are being reshaped by low fertility, population aging, economic precarity, changing gender relations, and shifting state policies. Rather than treating family change simply as the decline or diversification of family forms, the session approaches it as a contested field in which gender, care, reproduction, intimacy, and demographic futures are politically and socially negotiated.

We welcome historical, comparative, and contemporary analyses of family and intimate life across East Asian societies. Papers may address marriage decline, delayed marriage, non-marriage, divorce, single-person households, queer intimacies, transnational families, migrant care, elder care, childcare, work-family conflict, pronatalist policies, familialism, housing insecurity, youth precarity, intergenerational inequality, and the changing meanings of kinship and belonging. The session is especially interested in how demographic crisis narratives shape public policy, everyday life, and moral expectations around gender, care, and reproduction.

By bringing together feminist, sociological, and comparative perspectives, the session aims to explore how East Asian families and intimacies are being reimagined, governed, and contested in the context of demographic anxiety and social transformation.