Book Review: Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China by Ke Li and Decoupling: Gender Injustice in China’s Divorce Courts by Ethan Michelson

Abstract

Chapter five and the postscript provide the last opportunities for Nishida to expand her work beyond the typical iterations of activism and theorizing one might expect in an academic text. Chapter five tells the stories of bed activists through their own experiences, their dreams and imagination, where another world is possible despite the ableist realities we all face daily. The postscript offers important insights from our collect experiences in the mass disabling event of the COVID pandemic. With special care taken to acknowledge the real fatigue disabled people experience educating an ableist world inside a pandemic, Nishida challenges readers to center disabled voices at this time and follow their lead while simultaneously voicing the frustration of writing about a pandemic inside of one. The most challenging part of this text is reading the ableist perspectives of largely Black migrant women care workers of mostly white disabled Medicaid enrollees. Nishida captures the discriminatory design built into the care worker/care partner relationship and the resulting antagonisms that make the situation tough to negotiate. Care workers are working in a system that already devalues their labor, partially because of who they are and who they care for. Care partners are invited into a system that allows them to think of their care workers as service providers, with the accompanying potential for racialized interactions with “the help.” Nishida traverses this tension well, but the complexity of the multiple power differentials in this arrangement is difficult to track and address with equity, begging the unanswered question of whether the shape of these multiple power imbalances is similar, a potential new line of inquiry this text might inspire. Just Care, in both content and form, embodies just care.