Fertility And The State: Chinese Women In The 1950s Infant Health Campaign In The Political Science And Gender,

Concentrating on how the reproductive behavior was turned from traditional taboos and local customs into public health issue, this thesis draws a picture of the making of "modern midwives" and the health campaign encompassing different facets from the center to the grass roots. By comparing oral narratives with local archives, propaganda materials, rural textbook on new midwifery, and official publications, it aims to probe into the most private sphere of rural life, to clarify how official actions, political events and local practices were mutually implicated in changing the social landscape.It examines how women's bodies, emotions and the hygienic knowledge served as the crucial agency for establishing political legitimacy Specifically, it explores how the pain of labor, the suffering of disease, infection, and difficult childbirth were represented symbolically in the political ritual of "speaking bitterness" (suku), where women's emotional expression transcended individual experience to imagine a painful collective memory, evoking people's political passions and identification with the state, and women's understanding of the new government as the liberator from pain, legitimating the political discourse of "liberation". Furthermore, it displays how the desexualized discourse of labor force mobilization brought women's menstrual cycle and pregnancy conditions into the open, constructed their material experience and cognition of the new hygienic knowledge.This research also is equipped with a strong sense of questions on political culture and the body. Through the lens of examining childbirth, health and the body, it perceives an effective avenue to decipher Chinese political culture by focusing on the symbol of "body", which buttresses political concepts and ideologies by making them concrete parts of people's daily lives. At last, how was the material experience of people's bodies and emotions which served as medium to concrete the political discourse in turn shaped people's cognition provides the final question in this thesis.