Domestication in the Making: Urban Chinese Young Adults and Companion Cats

Against the backdrop of cats emerging as the primary nonhuman companion animals among urban young adults in China, existing studies, largely framed by functionalism, tend to overlook feline subjectivity. Drawing on multispecies ethnography, this article mobilizes “domestication” as a conceptual placeholder and, through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and online ethnography, traces the ongoing making of domestication in youth-cat relations. The findings reveal that domestication, in practice, comprises repeated repair work encompassing care, conflict, and negotiation. In relationships, embodied exchanges such as touch and mutual gaze foster cross-species empathy and temperament cultivation, yet they also carry the risk of narcissistic projection. In place, domus-making – through spatial yielding, object re-scripting, and ritual memory – extends multispecies kinship and brings a “multispecies family” into being, even as the return of “wildness” keeps household boundaries in motion. Domestication thus unfolds within mutuality, uncertainty, and continual tinkering.