Book Review: From Modernity to Marriageability: Mobility and Masculine Recognition in Urban China LinXiaodong. Gender, From Modernity to Marriageability: Mobility and Masculine Recognition in Urban China. New York: Routledge, 2013. xv + 145 pp. ISBN: 978-0-415-62657-6.GosperSarah. Masculinity, Marriage and Rural Men in Urban China: Modest Expectations. London: Routledge, 2025. pp. ISBN: 978-1-032-76792-5.

This review essay reads Xiaodong Lin’s (2013) and Sarah Gosper’s (2025) studies of rural-origin men in urban China to explain why mobility often raises income without securing masculine recognition. Lin shows how migrant men pursue recognition through modernity-framed practices of work and filial provision, while Gosper demonstrates that marriageability has emerged as a tighter and more exclusionary site of masculine certification amid labour precarity. Together, the books reveal a shift from modernity-based judgments of manhood to intimate and marital criteria that increasingly mediate recognition. Conceptualising recognition as a socially negotiated verdict, the essay proposes cross-field capital convertibility as a lens for understanding why mobility-generated resources carry uneven value across family, work, and intimate arenas.