Governing intimacy in state spaces: Ethnography of a marriage registry in Southwest China

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a marriage registry in Southwest China, this paper explores how intimacy is governed through state space. Findings reveal that amid population decline and diversifying intimate forms, marriage registries function as heterotopias where marriage and divorce, normality and deviation, are juxtaposed in a continuous configuration, rendering ambiguity a mode of governance. By foregrounding how gender norms are simultaneously stabilised and unsettled within everyday institutional spaces, this analysis enriches sociological debates on heterotopia, intimacy, and gendered power beyond a static opposition between domination and resistance.