"Left-Behind" Girls' Tensions and Challenges During COVID-19 Pandemic: Gendered Expectations and Boys Before Girls in Rural China

• In Event: Navigating Education in COVID-19

Abstract

This article focuses on five young “left-behind” girls’ experiences in a time of social isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. “Left-behind” children in rural China are those whose parent(s) go out to urban areas and leave them in their hometowns. Based on a larger ethnographic project that included place-based observations and interactions with participants prior to the shutdown, along with data on girls’ tensions and challenges collected via multiple rounds of virtual interviews during lockdown, the author examines how the pandemic has impacted these girls experiences of school and family life, exposing and magnifying gender inequalities, particularly related to issues of maltreatment exerted by their guardians and/or brothers, all of which need to be addressed and merited.

Author

• Jue Wang, University of Idaho