| How do people's lived experiences influence institutional growth at the same time that such growth shapes the experiences? My dissertation explores this long-standing anthropological question through a discussion of the sociosomatic links between the emergence of one national institution—China's Disabled Persons' Federation—and the identity formation of Chinese men who have trouble walking.; The study's opening chapter describes ways the Federation's birth in 1988 stemmed from the confluence of historical forces and the crippling of Deng Xiaoping's eldest son, Deng Pufang. A discussion follows of ways, long before Pufang's paraplegia, government modes of objectification promoted a definition of disablement in China centered on the concept of “physically disabled” men. I then describe how, in the last decade, Federation growth developed from and extended those earlier discourses.; The concluding three chapters detail how men of different socioeconomic backgrounds who fell under the Federation's formal rubric for “physically disabled” were affected by and, to a more limited degree, affected the Federation in the early 1990s. In Chapter 4, I discuss why Beijing men with mobility difficulties were some of those most willing to embrace and challenge the Federation. In Chapter 5, I explore how changing community organization in rural Hainan inhibited Federation growth and how local men related to the Federation's relatively weak institutional presence. Finally in Chapter 6, I explore, through a discussion of marriage and narrative analysis, processes of identity formation by which—outside of the direct presence of the Federation—adult men in Beijing and Hainan (who had trouble walking) often, at once, came to embrace and spurn local and state visions of bodily difference.; Besides contributing to medical, China and gender anthropology, this dissertation aims at moving disability studies into the social sciences' mainstream by exploring how “disabled” bodies may be understood as analytical bridges spanning the conceptual realms of macro history and local experience. The ethnographic basis of this study is twenty months of fieldwork (1993–1995) conducted in two distinct Chinese settings: a middle-income district of Beijing and a rural region of Hainan, a province of China located east of Vietnam. |
