The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Socialist China

Yige Dong

The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Socialist China

dc.contributor.author	Yige Dong
dc.date.accessioned	2024-04-22T17:16:30Z
dc.date.available	2024-04-22T17:16:30Z
dc.date.issued	2023-05-08
dc.description	Video of full lecture with presentation slides edited into the video.
dc.description.abstract	Based on the speaker’s book-in-progress, this lecture examines how the way of doing care—performing paid and unpaid reproductive labor that maintains our daily life and attends to people who are in need—has changed among Chinese workers during the rise and fall of industrial socialism. Drawing on archival data, oral histories, and participatory observation in a textile mill town in central China, this research compares three generations of manufacturing workers’ experience of doing care, with a focus on the realm of childcare and domestic labor, and explains why care work had changed from unpaid “women’s work” in the household to a core constituent of labor welfare during socialist industrialization, and then has been removed from welfare provisions in recent decades. Shifting the analytical focus from the sphere of production to that of social reproduction, this study offers a reinterpretation of Chinese socialism and highlights the indispensable role of gender in understanding political economy. Prof. Dong’s primary research interest lies at the intersection of political economy, social inequality, and social change. Currently, she is working on a book project, The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Industrial China, which examines the changing politics of care in China’s industrial sector in the past century. Prof. Dong has been awarded the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship in China Studies (2021-2022).
dc.description.sponsorship	East Asia Program, the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Department of History, ILR School's Global Labor Institute, The Levinson China and Asia Pacific Studies Program, and Cornell's Society for the Humanities.
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1813/115147
dc.language.iso	en
dc.publisher	East Asia Program, Cornell University
dc.relation.hasversion	https://youtu.be/q9B_4r_mYak?si=kQsepvv4guoCDCyG
dc.rights	Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International	en
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
dc.subject	History
dc.subject	East Asia
dc.subject	China
dc.subject	Feminism
dc.subject	Sociology
dc.title	The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Socialist China
dc.type	video/moving image
schema.accessibilityFeature	captions
schema.accessibilityHazard	none
schema.accessibilitySummary	closed captions available