If North Korea figures in the imagination of inhabitants of the Western world at all, it is only dimly perceived and little understood. The little that most of us know is that it is a secretive country with an impoverished population, that it is governed by an ostensibly communist regime led by the autocratic Kim dynasty and is bent on developing nuclear weapons. Occasionally, we hear stories of those who have escaped its closely guarded borders. In this book, Hyun-Joo Lim provides us with a deeper understanding of living in and escaping from North Korea – the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). In particular, she demonstrates that North Koreans’ experiences of deprivation, human rights violations and defection are highly gendered. She lays bare the oppression and abuse suffered by North Korean women both within the DPRK and during their escape through China.

The book is based on narratives of women defectors/refugees from the DPRK resident in the UK and who left the DPRK between 2016 and 2022. Lim initially interviewed North Korean human rights activists, both male and female, through which the gendered character of human rights abuses came to the fore. She then focused her attention on North Korean women in the UK, including a minority who were engaged in activism. Lim faced numerous challenges in gaining access to this group of women and researching their lives. In a context where the DPRK’s embassy monitors the activities of defectors, most keep a low profile lest they risk harm to their families back home. Winning their trust and establishing their willingness to participate in sensitive research was by no means easy. The vulnerability of participants and their families still in the DPRK raised particular ethical concerns in safeguarding anonymity and confidentiality as well as ensuring support for those who needed it. Lim also discusses the impact on herself of hearing distressing details of women’s experiences and her sense of helplessness in the face of the suffering they described. Additionally, Lim’s South Korean background presented barriers; she may have shared a common language and ethnic heritage with her participants, but her cultural and social experience differed greatly from theirs.

This is the first book on masculinity in the series and the first on China, which is in keeping with our ambition for the series to be truly international in scope. Those of us who live in the ‘Western world’ are increasingly aware of the rise of China as a global power, but what we glean from the media about life in China is the intensive surveillance of an authoritarian party-state and its human rights abuses – especially, at the time of writing, the oppression of the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. We know less about the everyday lives of Chinese citizens as they negotiate the many challenges they face as a result of China's rapid socioeconomic transformations. Siyang Cao offers us an illuminating picture of some of those everyday lives through the experiences of the young urban men she interviewed, men who define themselves as simply ‘ordinary’.

While there is a substantial and growing body of research on China, this book makes an original and important contribution to expanding our knowledge, both empirically and conceptually. Importantly, it adds something new to the study of Chinese men and masculinities. Much existing research in this field comes from historical or cultural studies perspectives, while more sociological work has tended to focus on particular groups of men, such as wealthy entrepreneurs and, at the other end of the social sale, migrant manual workers. Tongzhi (gay/queer men) have also received considerable attention. The men Siyang Cao interviewed, like the vast majority of Chinese men, fit into none of these categories; this is one sense in which they can be defined as ‘ordinary’ in that they are neither rich nor poor and are not exceptional in any way. They are heterosexual, mostly university educated and would broadly fit within China's growing middle class. They distance themselves from the extravagant excesses of wealthy businessmen as well as from new ‘softer’ forms of masculinity visible in popular culture.

Internationalizing sociology entails more than merely studying diverse parts of the world or the application of ‘Western’ sociological perspectives to other places; it requires the development of new conceptual vocabularies that move sociological research forward.

We are delighted to have this book in a series that aims to bring original sociological thinking to bear on contemporary gender relations, divisions and issues of concern to feminists. It is our aim for the series that it will challenge received wisdom, offer new insights and expand the scope of sociology both theoretically and substantively, and we are convinced that this book by Vicki Dabrowski does all of those things.

This preface is being written after three months of ‘lockdown’ as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The gendered impacts of lockdown are adding to the long-term effects of austerity, as outlined in this book, and rendering the lives of many women even more challenging. While so far more men have died of COVID-19 in the UK, women may suffer more from the long-term effects, as these will be added to the already higher levels of morbidity in older women. Evidence is also emerging about the higher levels of childcare, domestic work and home schooling undertaken by women during lockdown, and of course for women who are single parents this extra labour will be completely their responsibility. It is also the case that more women have been furloughed and are concerned that their jobs may disappear, and that women are disproportionately represented in the sectors of the labour market most likely to shrink. In this book, Dabrowski writes about the symbolic connections between austerity and the post-war period of ‘thrifty housewives’ and this symbolism has been rolled out frequently over the last few months. While not always explicit, the image — like a picture from a 1950s Ladybird book of a mother in the kitchen, teaching her small daughter to bake a cake — is in the background of many discussions about managing lockdown. Traditional assumptions about the so-called nuclear family have been at the fore and the likelihood of women losing their jobs and/or having increased caring responsibilities looms large, while at the same time the state withdraws the extra, albeit limited, support put in place during the crisis. All of these factors will have a far greater impact on those women who are already dealing with the austerity policies which have been in place since the economic crash of 2007–8.

We are very pleased to have this book in a series that aims to bring original sociological thinking to bear on contemporary gender relations, divisions and issues of concern to feminists. It is our aim for the series that it will challenge received wisdom, offer new insights and expand the scope of sociology both theoretically and substantively.

We confess that milk sharing is a topic that we had not thought about sociologically prior to receiving the proposal from the authors of this book. Also, as non-mothers, it was not something we had encountered in our personal lives. However, this series seeks to embrace all aspects of gendered social life using sociological perspectives, and as it is one of the core aims of sociology to render the familiar strange and the unfamiliar comprehensible, and, as feeding infants is a significant area of many women's everyday lives we felt that the book was a good fit. The book illustrates the ways in which milk sharing disrupts the usual body boundaries around women and babies – boundaries which extend the individualism which is dominant in the global North to include breast milk – only the birth mother's milk is generally viewed as suitable and appropriate for her baby, unless of course the choice is made to use manufactured formula, or milk from a breast milk bank is ‘medically’ indicated. The research undertaken by the authors provides data to show how women can work collectively to provide peer milk, as opposed to more formal institutionalized arrangements, to the benefit of both mothers and babies. The in-depth ethnographic approach enables the reader to really understand, not only the reasons behind peer milk sharing, and its utility, but also the social relations and practices which develop through the process. The authors argue that ‘peer milk-sharing communities can be conceptualized as biocommunities of practice where bio-intimacy is created through the exchange of biological material and the establishing of (bio-) intimacy and affective bonds between donors and recipients’. They draw on the concept of ‘biological citizenship’ developed by Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas, linking this to ‘communities of practice’ through the process of collectivizing individual biological experiences through activism.

This book is the first in a series that aims to bring original sociological thinking to bear on contemporary gender relations, divisions and issues of concern to feminists. We hope the series will challenge received wisdom, offer new insights and expand the scope of sociological knowledge both theoretically and substantively.

In tackling the issue of paid domestic cleaning, Lotika Singha raises questions that trouble the common feminist view that this work is particularly demeaning and degrading to those who do it and that to pay another woman to clean one's home is against feminist principles. She does not deny the material inequalities that (usually) exist between those who clean and those who use their services, nor the injustices experienced by cleaners, but instead asks why this relationship should be so abhorrent to feminist sensibilities. In investigating this issue, she takes seriously the accounts of women who do paid domestic cleaning, as well as those who use their services, in order to develop an analysis that enables us to view this work and the relationships and contexts within which it is carried out rather differently. She questions the definition of cleaning as unskilled manual labour, arguing that cleaning well involves skill, experience and organisation. She also tackles some of the double standards in play in the moral judgements made about cleaning. If it is politically unacceptable to expect others to clean up after us, why is this issue seen as far more problematic in the home than in the workplace or the street? If it is because it is our ‘personal’ mess, why do we not care so much when our waste leaves the house? In addressing such questions, understandings of cleanliness, dirt and dirty work are subjected to scrutiny.

Previous research emphasising the exploitative and degrading characteristics of paid cleaning has focused on those most vulnerable to exploitation and abuse: migrant women working full-time for a single employer, and often living-in; this research has attended to racialised relationships between employers and employees. In such situations, injustices abound – a result of state policies that govern such employment as well as the conduct of employers. The research underpinning this book does not involve transnational migrants but situations in which those who clean and those they clean for are of the same nationality and, in the main, the same ethnicity.