Reproductive Subjects: The Global Politics of Health in China, 1927-1964

reproductive health;modern China;History (General);Women"s and Gender Studies;Humanities;Social Sciences;History & Women"s Studies

Hubbard, JoshuaWingrove, Elizabeth R ;

University of Michigan

关键词: reproductive health;    modern China;    History (General);    Women";    s and Gender Studies;    Humanities;    Social Sciences;    History & Women"s Studies;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/137160/hubbardj_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In the middle third of the twentieth century, the distinct aims of international health organizations, new imperialisms, transnational feminisms, and Chinese state-building converged on the reproductive functions of Chinese women. Reproductive Subjects probes the reciprocal relations among these diverse actors to ask how and why childbirth and mothering in China proved integral not only to Chinese state-building, but also to early ventures in international health and a realignment of global political power in the decades surrounding the Second World War. Reproductive Subjects moves between scales, reading local, provincial, and national public health reports in China alongside the correspondence of international organizations and the writings of Chinese health professionals who studied and worked throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas from the 1920s to the 1960s.By bringing together these dispersed archives, Reproductive Subjects outlines a global conjuncture—characterized by the flourishing of international organizations, unequal relations between putatively autonomous nation-states, the woman question, and the ascendancy of biomedical public health—that imbued Chinese women’s reproduction with global political significance. This project demonstrates the multifaceted political utility of maternal and infant health (MIH) resulting from the linking of demographic measures of mortality to medicalized notions of women’s shared yet variable capacity to reproduce and nurture. Though often framed within the rhetoric of Chinese nationalism, Chinese MIH remained critical to the broader work of foreign and international actors to manage international health and trade in the Pacific. These aims proved compatible—in fact, integral—to contemporaneous efforts to forge a Chinese state with the territory, population, and administration required for legibility to an emerging international order of nation-states. Chinese-government propaganda emphasized scientific mothercraft as gendered service to the state. However, Chinese feminists in alliance with an international maternalist movement reframed the ;;facts” of maternal and infant mortality as evidence of state failure and demanded legal protections for health and welfare. By tracing the careers of health advocates whose lives crossed the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Reproductive Subjects further demonstrates how the personnel and precedent of Nationalist-era MIH programs proved critical to the later management of both mortality and fertility in Communist China, Nationalist Taiwan, and the Cold War world.