Dates: May 10th-11th, 2024
Location: WDR 1003
In recent years, interdisciplinary scholars have addressed discourses and acts of care on the topics of gender and housework, generation and aging, public health (including mental health), as well as affect and subjectivity. These contributions on care – as practices of labor, gifting, exchange, and governance– highlight the necessity of attending to the potentialities and possibilities of gender and care as analytical frameworks that may help us to re-imagine our relationships with society and environment as well as to redraw the boundaries that confine us to our disciplinary, national, and gendered forms of inclusion and belonging. To this end, we ask how, the logic of care, is not limited to conventional frameworks of analysis but a pervasive aspect of human existence that needs to be highlighted.
This conference brings together scholars from various disciplines to discuss the logics and fabrics of care in diverse settings. Panel one, chaired by Dr. Yu Wang, takes the family as a unit and explores how practices of care affect people’s migratory, work, and health trajectories. Panel two, chaired by Dr. Nellie Chu, explores the gendered and tacit acts of care enfolded into the making, consumption, and circulation of textiles. Panel three, chaired by Dr. Mengqi Wang, examines the logics of care in infrastructural disrepair and repair in disasters and crisis. The conference ends with a book talk, offered by Dr. Casey James Miller, on his newly published monograph “Inside the Circle: Queer Culture and Activism in Northwest China” (Rutgers University Press). Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in northwest China, Casey James Miller tells the stories of two courageous and dedicated groups of queer activists in the city of Xi’an: a grassroots gay men’s HIV/AIDS organization called Tong’ai and a lesbian women’s group named UNITE.
Conference Schedule
*Opens only to the DKU community
May 10th
9:00 Opening Remark, Dr. Baozhen Luo-Hermanson (Duke Kunshan University)
9:10 Care and Gender in China, Dr. Ralph Litzinger (Duke University)
9:20-9:40 Tea break
Panel one (chair Yu Wang): Transitions and tensions: Navigating work, migration, and gender roles
9:40-10:00 Yiyue Huangfu (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Leaving Again? Migrants’ Exits from the Destination Areas in Urban China
10:00-10:20 Felicia F. Tian (Fudan University)
(Not) Return to Work: A comparative study of Chinese stay-at-home mothers in Shanghai, Singapore, and New York
10:20-10:40 Yu Wang (Duke Kunshan University)
Married men’s economic dependency, working overtime, and middle-aged men health trajectory in urban China
10:40-11:00 Discussion
11:00-13:00 Lunch break, CCT W3001
Panel two (chair Nellie Chu): Women in/and/for textiles: Fabricating cloth of care
13:00-13:20 Jeong Jiahn (Fudan University)
Fromto lipsticks with creative embroidery of Sibo women
13:20-13:40 Xiyao Zhang (Donghua University)
Fundamental technologies for the start of using textile fibers
13:40-14:00 Yan Yan (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
The formation of female experience in the transmission of Li brocade between mother and daughter
14:00-14:20 Yanping Ni (Princeton University)
Beyond circularity: Labor, materiality, and affect in a circular economy
14:20-14:40 Nellie Chu (Duke Kunshan University)
Discussion
15:00-15:30 Tea break
Panel three (chair Mengqi Wang): the infrastructure of care in crisis and disasters
15:30-15:50 Qiaoyun Zhang (Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University)
What to care: Governing affect in disaster recovery
15:50-16:10 Shiling Xu (Soochow University)
Post-disaster infrastructure arrangement and its impact on women: A rapid assessment in Jishishan
16:10-16:30 Mengqi Wang (Duke Kunshan University)
The repair of homes: “Rotten-tail” buildings and the logic of repair in housing driven capital accumulation
16:30-16:50 Discussion
18:00 Dinner with panellists and DKU faculty at 大鱼海棠 Dayu Begonia Restaurant
May 11th
9:30-10:30 Informal discussion
10:30-11:30 Concluding remark: Mengqi Wang
11:30-13:30 Lunch break, CCT W3001
13:30 Book talk (Casey Miller)
Inside the Circle: Queer Culture and Activism in Northwest China
Abstracts
Panel #1 Transitions and tensions: Navigating work, migration, and gender roles
The family is the primary site for caregiving responsibilities, a role that is inherently shaped by gender dynamics. The gendered care behaviour not only shapes the power dynamics within families but also has profound influences on various family-related outcomes and life transitions. In this panel, we will discuss how gendered norms surrounding work and motherhood would influence mother’s decision of returning or not returning to work after childbirth across three different contexts. Additionally, we will explore how labour market insecurity and family dynamics influence migration decision of men and women differently, and how relative income differences and overworking behaviour of the spouses shape married men’s health trajectory.
Leaving again? Migrants’ exits from the destination areas in urban China
Yiyue Huangfu, Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)
Despite the importance given to the motivation of migration, previous studies have paid insufficient attention to the impact of migrants’ experiences in the destination labor market on their subsequent migration decisions. The current research addresses this gap by investigating the relationship between migrants’ decisions to leave the current place of destination and two key aspects of migrants’ experiences — labor market experience and family dynamics. By leveraging panel survey data from China, we explore how employment insecurity and household circumstances affect the risk of leaving the current destination city and migrants’ next destination choices. Additionally, we differentiate and compare exit decision-making patterns by gender. We find a nonlinear relationship between employment insecurity and decision to leave, where migrant workers with medium level of employment insecurity are more likely to leave, as compared to their peers with low and high levels of employment insecurity. This relationship only pertains to male migrant workers. In contrast, female migrants’ exit decision is influenced more by their household conditions. Our findings thus have important implications for understanding the complexities of migration dynamics.
(Not) Return to work: A comparative study of Chinese stay-at-home mothers in Shanghai, Singapore, and New York
Felicia F. Tian, Fudan University, Zheng Mu, Jialin Wu and Xiao Mei
Juggling work and parenting is often a complicated and demanding task, especially for mothers. As evolving gender norms encourage women to be both successful workers and devoted mothers, many struggle with work–family conflict as they try to “have it all”. How this norm of having it all affects mothers’ work decisions can vary, depending on the prevailing societal expectations. However, most studies on stay-at-home mothers focus on a single cultural context, and on their decisions to leave the labor market. We propose a comparative lens to explore how college-educated, stay-at-home Chinese mothers make sense of their decisions of returning or not returning to work, and what the obstacles they face. Stay-at-home mothers in three societies all state their non-working status as temporary and express desires and preparations for return to work. They all claim that they need support to make it happen. However, mothers vary in types of support they want—in Shanghai, it is the lack of flexible job opportunity; in New York, it is the affordability of childcare, and in Singapore, it is the combination of the two. The results call for a cross-cultural perspective in relation to societal prevailing gender norms.
Married men’s economic dependency, working overtime, and middle-aged men health trajectory in urban China.
Yu Wang, Duke Kunshan University
The traditional male breadwinner model still exerts a significant influence in Chinese society. Serving as the primary breadwinner carries profound symbolic implications for men, shaping notions of masculinity within the household. Failure to meet this breadwinner role and becoming economically dependent challenges traditional gender norms, posing a significant threat to masculinity and potentially impacting men’s health. In this study, we investigate the interplay between couples’ relative economic status, spousal overwork, and the mental and physical health trajectory of husbands. Drawing on data from the 2011-2020 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), our analysis focuses on men aged 45 to 58 in urban areas of China. Employing a trajectory group-based model, our findings reveal a positive association between men’s mental health trajectory and their economic dependency on their wives. Specifically, as wives out-earn their husbands, husbands are more likely to be grouped into the poor mental health category, experiencing a decline in mental well-being over time.
Panel #2: Women in/and/for textiles: Fabricating cloth of care
Textiles constitute a highly gendered material category, in literature and in praxis. Textiles are often woven, sewed, designed, dyed, repaired, preserved, displayed, and recently recycled and innovated by women; the life cycle of each piece of textile congeals and conveys many women’s embodied labor, wisdom, imagination, and care – processes not without gendered exploitation, to be acknowledged. In perishing cultures and marginalized communities, weaving work remains core to preserving collective memories and inspiring movements and activism (e.g., Tivaivai in the Cook Islands; the National AIDS Memorial Quilt). In a world where the overconsumption of textiles has increasingly risen as an environmental and human rights crisis (as in the fast fashion industry), we have also witnessed women at the frontline of reimagining our future with textile materials (by initiating recycling non-profit organizations, conducting experiments with plant-based fibers, and so forth). Yet, that connection – of how textiles are gendered in history and now and how women are constantly giving new meanings to textiles – is underexamined, as well as the tacit acts of care enfolded into those fibrous materials.
Fromto Lipsticks with Creative Embroidery of Sibo Women
Jeong Jiahn, Fudan University and Jiaqi Tian, Fordham University
Inspired by antiquarian East Asian fashion, Fromto produces handcrafted accessories and beauty products that transcend time and space. We decorate the human body with lapis, carnelian, and natural colors from safflower, indigo, and sappan. In our safflower-themed lipstick collection ‘The Old Rouge’, we are honored to collaborate with and present Sibo embroiderers, all of whom are women. Fromto starts the collaboration project by helping improve local women’s economic level with more jobs in Sibo embroidery. By replacing the common faux-leather or plastic top case of lipstick with embroidered artworks, our strategy is to change the consumption contexts of crafts, from objects of decoration to products of long-term utility. Our next step is to boost the confidence and creativity of individual embroiderers by building mutual dependence between them and urban Chinese residents through online and in-person Sibo stitching workshops. Together with art historians and interdisciplinary artists, Fromto will be the art director presenting Sibo embroiderers as instructors to the urban customers with do-it-yourself Sibo stitching content. We believe the unfussy yet poetic Sibo embroidery stitches could be incorporated into urban daily life as a form of art therapy. Continuous fieldwork data collection and product development are expected every year with more anthropological and sociological insights. Despite we have kick-started the project with the help of the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) of Jiangsu Province, we sincerely invite more researchers and creatives to join this project about preserving and repurposing local embroidery as well as the creatives behind it, Sibo women.
Fundamental technologies for the start of using textile fibers
Xiyao Zhang, Donghua University
In most of the historical times, most of the textile workers are women but not men. Having a brief concept of technologies leading to the birth of textiles and textile activities, one can understand why this happened. As the basic element of textiles, a fiber is generally a matter having a length of 100 times its diameter. Knowledgeable people in modern times, who have learned textile production, know well about how to make textiles from fibers. However, human beings would not have known collecting and processing visible fibers such as cotton or wool when they first saw them, nor did they have the motivation to extract invisible fibers from plant stems, leaves, or silkworm cocoons. The know-how of using fibers came from the experience of making textiles with both strength and fineness, which was accumulated from the early technologies: braiding, weaving, cord-making, and spinning. Based on archaeological evidence and experimental experience, this presentation will demonstrate the technological origin of weaving and spinning, respectively differentiated from braiding and cord-making techniques.
The formation of female experience in the transmission of Li brocade between mother and daughter
Yan Yan, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
This research paper explores the transmission of Li brocade (Lijin, 黎锦) , a textile created by Li women on Hainan Island in southeast China, and its role in connecting generations of Li women while shaping their female experience from birth, marriage, to death. Despite Hainan’s fame as a tourist destination since 1988, the indigenous Li ethnic group, as one of the 56 nationalities in China and the indigenous in Hainan, residing in the rural Wuzhishan (五指山) area remains relatively unknown. Consequently, Li brocade has undergone passive transformation as it is interpreted by the government and tourists as a cultural industry or symbol of nationalism. Furthermore, teaching and learning of Li brocade have shifted from a traditional mother-daughter experience to a modern institutional setting. However, Li brocade goes beyond being a mere material object; it actively connects Li women with the outside world and fosters their embodied culture. This paper employs literature review and oral history to investigate how the transmission of Li brocade strengthens the bond between Li mothers and daughters, shapes their daily and ritual practices, and transcends political and historical contexts. By examining the hidden narratives, reevaluating the present, and exploring future possibilities, this study aims to uncover the transformative potential of Li brocade in shaping the female experience.
Beyond circularity: Labor, materiality, and affect in a circular economy
Yanping Ni, Princeton University
When it comes to circular economy (CE), scholarly analysis tends to focus on the circulation’s directions, flows, and channels, among other logistic arrangements that enable discarded waste to be recycled, reused, and repaired for the purpose of extending the remaining value. Little attention, however, has been paid to the huge labor demands of this tortuous process. This inattention leaves the corporeality and materiality of the circular economy underexamined. My immersive ethnographic research with Fabscrap – a non-profit organization based in Brooklyn, New York, dedicated to the recycling and reuse of pre-consumer textile waste collected from fashion brands – reveals that examining the logistics of a circular economy alone is far from adequate. Whereas the organization attempts to attract voluntary participation by stressing the circular chains towards a “zero-waste” future, volunteers who regularly contribute labor are driven by other inclinations. Calling discarded materials “babies,” volunteers build and enhance attachment to textiles themselves through physical and affective labor. For many of them, activities normally viewed as tedious and laborious are opportunities to closely perceive, engage, and embody the allure of performative textile objects. The contribution of these volunteers, most of whom are women and queer people, is twofold: investment of time and labor that proves necessary to sustain the operation of a circular economy and; as importantly, cultivation of care for things that fundamentally makes activities of waste salvaging intriguing and fulfilling. The second half is core to frontline volunteers’ experiences, yet it is much undervalued and downplayed in the discourses of circular economy. This paper foregrounds “care for things” and argues for its significance amidst our ongoing environmental crises. Apart from redirecting logistics, recultivating our relations with materials might be even more crucial for pulling us out of the deranged overconsumption and overproduction.
Panel #3 Logics of care in infrastructural disrepair and repair in disasters and crisis.
Buildings, bridges, and homes are important yet often taken-for-granted sites where socioeconomic production and reproduction are organized. They are oftentimes taken as the background in which we carry out everyday lives and only come to the foreground in times of breakdown, failure, and crisis. Taking infrastructure as “a sociotechnical ensemble of contingently allied forces” (Chu 2014: 353), this panel examines how the logic of care manifest in moments of infrastructure breakdowns and repairs. We aim to view infrastructure disrepair not as atypical events but “means by which society learn and learn to re-produce” (Graham and Thrift 2007: 5).
What to care: Governing affect in disaster recovery
Qiaoyun Zhang, Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College
This presentation explores the role of affect—encompassing a broad range of emotions and feelings—in the disaster recovery process, with a focus on the understanding and consideration of these affective dimensions by various stakeholders. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in the Chinese ethnic Qiang region and New Orleans, USA, it examines how different stakeholders—ranging from policymakers and aid organizations to affected communities and individuals—perceive, interpret, and respond to the emotional landscapes that emerge in the aftermath of disasters. The presentation will focus on how in the two research sites, affected populations discussed their hopes and disillusions for home-making throughout their negotiations with various recovery governance powers. By analyzing the affected populations’ discourse and practice of care for their material and nonmaterial belongings and relationships, the presentation provides a nuanced investigation of the epistemological and practical gaps in disaster response and policymaking under neoliberal and nationalist agendas.
Post-disaster infrastructure arrangement and its impact on women: a rapid assessment in Jishishan
Shiling Xu, Soochow University
Disasters disrupt everyday life in communities primarily by destroying houses. As a major response approach, temporary shelters provide new spaces and communities where people resume survival and reproduction activities and try to adapt to changes. Based on a rapid assessment in affected communities three weeks after the M6.2 Jishishan earthquake (18 December 2023), the research describes the drastic changes in home living spaces as well as in community public spaces and the consequent impacts on women’s reproduction labor and care responsibilities. In particular, the crowded makeshift shelters limit indoor and outdoor labor and social interaction of local females and create extra labor burden for them at the same time. Defects in community infrastructure such as toilets, bathing facilities, and water supply points create disproportionate health and security risks for females. In further analysis, the assessment team argues for a risk of higher psychosocial stress in females as the result of activity limitation, extra labor, health and security risks combined with local domestic violence history and perceived economic concerns after the earthquake. The situation is likely to last due to an evident makeshift characteristics of post-disaster infrastructure strengthened by the new reconstruction policy, which may have yielded reluctance of investment and neglect of daily needs of females in pursuit of a delicate balance of long-term political economy of reconstruction and short-term social stability.
The repair of homes: “Rotten-tail” buildings and the logic of repair in housing driven capital accumulation
Mengqi Wang, Duke Kunshan University
This presentation draws on ethnographic and media reports of abandoned constructions, known to the locals as “rotten-tail buildings,” that have been showing up in urban China amid the country’s ongoing real estate crisis. Many apartments in “rotten-tail-buildings” were already sold, mostly to lower-middle class buyers. The homebuyers, most of whom invested lifelong savings and have taken on mortgages that would trap them for decades to come, had made life plans based on the time of the completion of construction. The halting of construction hence is disruptive and devastating to these families. They organized and demanded the developer to resume the construction. Some families moved to live in their unfinished apartments to reduce cost of living and/or to protest the injustice. This paper argues that homebuyers’ effort to make a home out of the bare concrete in abandoned constructions exhibits a logic of care and repair that works as a friction enabling the normal functioning of China’s real estate economy.
Speakers
Yiyue Huangfu is an Assistant Professor of urban studies and public policy at Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen). She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Huangfu is a social demographer and a stratification scholar, with interests in inequality, migration, and aging. Much of her current work substantively focuses on the causes, consequences, and contingencies of internal migration in China. A second major strand of her research examines the welfare of elderly populations and the production of health across the life course. She draws on theories in demography and population genetics to investigate the relationship between social environment, population health, and human physiology. Her work has appeared in journals, such as PANS nexus, Demographic Research, Population Studies, and PLOS One.
Felicia F. Tian is a Professor of Sociology and Vice Dean of School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University. Her research focuses on social networks and social capital, and family sociology in China from a comparative perspective. She serves on the Social Change Research Association and Shanghai Sociological Association. Her work appears in Social Networks, Social Stratification and Mobility, Journal of Marriage and Family, and China Quarterly. She is currently a principal investigator in a grant about community governance from National Social Science Foundation in China.
Yu Wang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Duke Kunshan University. She earned her BS and MS in Sociology from Renmin University and completed her MS and PhD in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017. Her research delves into various aspects of social dynamics in China, including intermarriage and individual achievement as pathways to social mobility, assortative mating and its implications for social inequality, and the complexities of work-family conflicts. Additionally, she explores social determinants of health, with a particular focus on child vaccination and preventative care-seeking behavior. Currently, Dr. Wang is engaged in projects examining the interplay between demographic shifts and assortative mating in contemporary China, as well as the correlation between motherhood and child vaccination. Her research has been funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Her scholarly contributions can be found in journals such as Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Social Science Research, American Journal of Public Health, and Conception.
Jiahn Jeong is a Ph.D candidate from Fudan University, National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies in the Asian Religion, Art, and History Graduate Program
Jiaqi Tian is Founder of Fromto, a beauty brand inspired by East Asian antiques
Xiyao Zhang is a PhD candidate who studies the history of textiles at the College of Textiles, Donghua University in Shanghai
Yan Yan is a PhD candidate from the Department of Chinese History and Culture at Hong Kong Polytechnic University in Hong Kong
Yanping Ni is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her work has appeared in the peer-reviewed journals China Information and Asian Bioethics Review and recently the public-facing forum Anthropology News.
Nellie Chu is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her research focuses on global supply chains in fashion and the transnational role of migrant entrepreneurs. She received her Ph.D degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Primarily trained in the anthropology of post-socialist China and the ethnography of global supply chains, she specialized in the intersecting topics of transnational capitalism, migration (transnational and domestic), counterfeit culture, gendered labor, industrialization, and urbanization. Her book manuscript, under contract with Duke University Press, explores labor and precarity in the fast fashion industry in Guangzhou. publications can be found on Positions: Asia Critique, Modern Asian Studies, Culture, Theory, and Critique.
Qiaoyun Zhang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences of Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College, China. A cultural anthropologist, Dr. Zhang’s research interests include post-disaster recovery, intangible cultural heritage safeguarding, and digital society. She has produced more than 10 publications in leading peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes including Journal of Contemporary China and Journal of American Folklore. She is the co-editor of the book Comparative Studies on Pandemic Control Policies and the Resilience of Society to be published by Springer in 2023. Currently, Dr. Zhang is preparing her book manuscript on post-disaster reconstruction of the Chinese ethnic Qiang communities and its relation to the recent decades’ modernization experiments in China.
Xu Shiling is a lecturer of humanitarian policy at the International Academy of the Red Cross (IARC) in Soochow University. She teaches humanitarian architecture and principles and climate as humanitarian topic for both college students and practitioners. She received her B.A. in Philosophy from Peking University in 2008 and Ph.D. in Humanities from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2015.
Before joining IARC in 2020, Shiling was an analyst at the UNDP-China Risk Governance Innovation Research Project and the Innovation Center for Risk Governance at Beijing Normal University. She has been a pro bono in disaster information management and emergency decision-making support in the role of analyst and co-founder of Zhuoming Info Aid since 2010. From 2018 to 2020, she wrote a monthly column on observation of civil society organizations in disaster response and international humanitarian dynamics for the journal China Disaster Reduction (《中国减灾》). In 2023, Shiling completed and published translation of Humanitarian Ethics. A Moral Guide to Aid in Wars and Disasters by Hugo Slim.
Mengqi Wang is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Duke Kunshan University. Her areas of specialty are economic anthropology, urban studies, gender and kinship studies, and the social studies of the market. Her research explores how home ownership and property relations implicate and structure state power, capitalism and everyday life in post-socialist China, as well as among overseas Chinese. Her publications can be found on Positions: Asian Critique, the Journal of Cultural Economy, Urban Studies.
Casey James Miller is a cultural anthropologist and an assistant professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His research has examined the intersections of gender, sexuality, health, and civil society in postsocialist urban China. His first book, Inside the Circle: Queer Culture and Activism in Northwest China, forthcoming from Rutgers University Press, is the first book to explore queer (tongzhi 同志) culture and activism in northwest China. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over a decade of fieldwork in urban northwest China from 2007–2019 involving over 70 people from local queer communities, civil society organizations, and government agencies, the book offers a novel, compelling, and intimately personal perspective on Chinese queer culture and activism. His other publications can be found on Medical Anthropology Quarterly and AIDS and Care: Psychological and Social-Medical Aspects of AIDS/HIV.
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