Zhujun Ma

This project explores how religious communities sustained and promoted the production of vernacular knowledge of mothering through circulating medical-moral tracts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the southeast port cities. By unpacking how women’s everyday practices of mothering were informed by, yet resistant to, vernacular religious, medical, and moral discourses, this project disrupts the historical and academic approach to motherhood as a metaphor emblematic of national politics and instead probes how mothering served as practices of care and technologies of self for historical actors in everyday life.