Ruochen Cao

This project offers a historical account of women’s reproductive care practices as they are understood, experienced, and remembered in rural China from 1949 to the 1980s. Focusing on the interaction among female care practitioners, including urban-based doctors and nurses, party cadres, rural midwives, and hygiene workers, this project examines how women's care labor performed physically, materially, and emotionally built and sustained the socialist system in China. Combining archival research, oral history interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, this project situates these women’s care labor at the intersections of the political economy of care and the political mobilization of the state. This project argues that women’s care practices, both physical and emotional, were not only an important form of gendered labor that maintained the low-cost social reproduction system in rural China, but also a technology of emotional mobilization that enabled the affective governance of the socialist state.