Pub Date : 2021-10-02DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2021.1987824
Christina N. Baker
Where would contemporary Black feminist explorations of pleasure be without Audre Lorde? Lorde’s 1978 essay on women’s pleasure, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, was groundbreaking in its call for women to reclaim the erotic as a source of feminine pleasure, knowledge, and power. For Lorde (2013), the erotic is “an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (p. 55). Lorde’s essay has become the focal point from which many Black feminist insights on the relationship between pleasure and power have evolved. There are good reasons for Black feminist author and journalist Joan Morgan’s (2015) reference to the understanding that it’s an “unwritten mandate” that all Black feminist work that explores the erotic must engage Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic. After more than 40 years, it remains necessary reading for anyone interested in understanding pleasure. As a testament to the continuing significance of Uses of the Erotic, I apply the ideas in Lorde’s pivotal treatise on the feminine power of the erotic to two contemporary films directed by Black women: Stella Meghie’s The Photograph (2020) and Radha Blank’s The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020). This commentary explores the ways that Black women filmmakers assert a creative power that is akin to Lorde’s definition of the erotic—both in their deeply engaging process of artistic creation and in the resulting films that center Black women characters’ empowering self-exploration.
{"title":"Revisiting Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic through Contemporary Film","authors":"Christina N. Baker","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.1987824","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1987824","url":null,"abstract":"Where would contemporary Black feminist explorations of pleasure be without Audre Lorde? Lorde’s 1978 essay on women’s pleasure, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, was groundbreaking in its call for women to reclaim the erotic as a source of feminine pleasure, knowledge, and power. For Lorde (2013), the erotic is “an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (p. 55). Lorde’s essay has become the focal point from which many Black feminist insights on the relationship between pleasure and power have evolved. There are good reasons for Black feminist author and journalist Joan Morgan’s (2015) reference to the understanding that it’s an “unwritten mandate” that all Black feminist work that explores the erotic must engage Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic. After more than 40 years, it remains necessary reading for anyone interested in understanding pleasure. As a testament to the continuing significance of Uses of the Erotic, I apply the ideas in Lorde’s pivotal treatise on the feminine power of the erotic to two contemporary films directed by Black women: Stella Meghie’s The Photograph (2020) and Radha Blank’s The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020). This commentary explores the ways that Black women filmmakers assert a creative power that is akin to Lorde’s definition of the erotic—both in their deeply engaging process of artistic creation and in the resulting films that center Black women characters’ empowering self-exploration.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":"44 1","pages":"470 - 476"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46808956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-22DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2021.1954119
M. Nadesan, Linda J. Kim
Abstract Japan conscripted a disputed number of “comfort women” to sexually service their soldiers in occupied territories during World War II. In the aftermath of war, this apparatus was ignored by international diplomacy, and few survivors related their experiences as sex slaves. However, during the early 1990s, sexual crimes against women achieved international attention, emboldened by and emboldening silence breakers whose personal experiences were both affirmed and negated by competing global stakeholders. Activists seeking recognition of and reparations for crimes against survivors of Japan’s comfort women system have since deployed memorials to contest Japan’s position that comfort women were sex workers. These memorials materially instantiate the conflicted interpretations of the scope and severity of Japan’s war crimes, whose undecidability signifies ruptures in the contemporary symbolic order of the United States, Japan, and South Korea alliance. This project examines how online audiences construct the meanings of the highly contested 2017 San Francisco memorial.
{"title":"The Geopolitics of Public Memory: The Challenge and Promise of Transnational Comfort Women Activism","authors":"M. Nadesan, Linda J. Kim","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.1954119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1954119","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Japan conscripted a disputed number of “comfort women” to sexually service their soldiers in occupied territories during World War II. In the aftermath of war, this apparatus was ignored by international diplomacy, and few survivors related their experiences as sex slaves. However, during the early 1990s, sexual crimes against women achieved international attention, emboldened by and emboldening silence breakers whose personal experiences were both affirmed and negated by competing global stakeholders. Activists seeking recognition of and reparations for crimes against survivors of Japan’s comfort women system have since deployed memorials to contest Japan’s position that comfort women were sex workers. These memorials materially instantiate the conflicted interpretations of the scope and severity of Japan’s war crimes, whose undecidability signifies ruptures in the contemporary symbolic order of the United States, Japan, and South Korea alliance. This project examines how online audiences construct the meanings of the highly contested 2017 San Francisco memorial.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":"45 1","pages":"123 - 142"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43203932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-09-01DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2021.1965683
Cheryl Price-McKell
Abstract In Greek mythology, Metis’s cunning intelligence and polymorphism are crucial in Zeus’s victory over the Titans. However, the paranoid god eventually swallows Metis and claims her cunning intellect as his own—an act analogous to the patriarchal consumption of women’s voice. The rhetorical concept of métis derived from this myth refers to wily, cunning, and polymorphic intelligence. This article explicates the rhetorical concept of métis and argues that women have employed métis polymorphic rhetoric throughout history to negotiate intersecting oppressions, protest injustice, and engender change. By reexamining the protest rhetoric of early feminist activists Sojourner Truth and Sarah Grimké and connecting their tactics to contemporary scholarship on feminist activism, this article draws attention to métis as a consistent determinant and a valuable theoretic framework already residing under the surface of much feminist rhetorical inquiry.
{"title":"A Legacy of Cunning Rhetorical Agility: Métis Polymorphism in the Protest Rhetoric of Sojourner Truth and Sarah Grimké","authors":"Cheryl Price-McKell","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.1965683","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1965683","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In Greek mythology, Metis’s cunning intelligence and polymorphism are crucial in Zeus’s victory over the Titans. However, the paranoid god eventually swallows Metis and claims her cunning intellect as his own—an act analogous to the patriarchal consumption of women’s voice. The rhetorical concept of métis derived from this myth refers to wily, cunning, and polymorphic intelligence. This article explicates the rhetorical concept of métis and argues that women have employed métis polymorphic rhetoric throughout history to negotiate intersecting oppressions, protest injustice, and engender change. By reexamining the protest rhetoric of early feminist activists Sojourner Truth and Sarah Grimké and connecting their tactics to contemporary scholarship on feminist activism, this article draws attention to métis as a consistent determinant and a valuable theoretic framework already residing under the surface of much feminist rhetorical inquiry.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":"45 1","pages":"254 - 272"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41475437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-25DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2021.1959470
Danielle C. Biss, P. Geist-Martin
Abstract There is increasing interest in the important, timely, and understudied topic of interpersonal processes related to a disclosure of sexual assault, especially because confidants may feel unprepared to respond appropriately to these disclosures. Examining how confidants respond to survivors when they disclose their sexual assault may play a role in dismantling the factors that silence survivors. Drawing from qualitative data gathered from 28 confidants’ sensemaking of their interactions with female survivors, the results utilize a critical interpersonal lens to unpack the competing discourses and regimes of truth that may support, silence, or complicate their communicative response to survivors' disclosures, which may or may not be positive. The analysis reveals two communication patterns: (1) reflecting hesitancy and (2) affirming validation. Theoretical implications about organizing of silence and practical implications proffer insight into what may be difficult or rewarding for confidants when responding to survivors’ disclosures of sexual assault.
{"title":"“It’s Hard Being Strong for Her, Because Sometimes I Find Myself Weak”: Reluctant Confidants’ Sensemaking of Survivors’ Sexual Assault Disclosures","authors":"Danielle C. Biss, P. Geist-Martin","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.1959470","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1959470","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract There is increasing interest in the important, timely, and understudied topic of interpersonal processes related to a disclosure of sexual assault, especially because confidants may feel unprepared to respond appropriately to these disclosures. Examining how confidants respond to survivors when they disclose their sexual assault may play a role in dismantling the factors that silence survivors. Drawing from qualitative data gathered from 28 confidants’ sensemaking of their interactions with female survivors, the results utilize a critical interpersonal lens to unpack the competing discourses and regimes of truth that may support, silence, or complicate their communicative response to survivors' disclosures, which may or may not be positive. The analysis reveals two communication patterns: (1) reflecting hesitancy and (2) affirming validation. Theoretical implications about organizing of silence and practical implications proffer insight into what may be difficult or rewarding for confidants when responding to survivors’ disclosures of sexual assault.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":"45 1","pages":"210 - 231"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42653286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-06DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2021.1954120
Ewa Glapka
Abstract This article presents an intersectional qualitative analysis of how young South African women of different racial identities relate to their bodies while talking about their fitness practices. The analysis addresses the debate on women’s aesthetic (self-)objectification, which is commonly considered as manifest in their workout routines. In a study of interview data, the routines are approached via critical discursive psychology and discursive psychology of affect. The study investigates the role of affect in positioning oneself as the subject of fitness practices. Examining the relationship between the lived and ideological aspects of participants’ workouts, the article finds that the surveillance of women’s bodies is negotiated as more than a “choice” to be the self-disciplined agent of one’s bodywork. The analysis explores these negotiations in terms of the distinction between living one’s body as an evaluated surface or as a sensing flesh. Discussing the findings, the article explains how discourse analysis refines an understanding of the role of fitness in embodying femininity.
{"title":"Women’s Fitness Practices in Postfeminist Culture: Discourse Analysis of Affect and of Bodies Dis-Appearing in Workout","authors":"Ewa Glapka","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.1954120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1954120","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article presents an intersectional qualitative analysis of how young South African women of different racial identities relate to their bodies while talking about their fitness practices. The analysis addresses the debate on women’s aesthetic (self-)objectification, which is commonly considered as manifest in their workout routines. In a study of interview data, the routines are approached via critical discursive psychology and discursive psychology of affect. The study investigates the role of affect in positioning oneself as the subject of fitness practices. Examining the relationship between the lived and ideological aspects of participants’ workouts, the article finds that the surveillance of women’s bodies is negotiated as more than a “choice” to be the self-disciplined agent of one’s bodywork. The analysis explores these negotiations in terms of the distinction between living one’s body as an evaluated surface or as a sensing flesh. Discussing the findings, the article explains how discourse analysis refines an understanding of the role of fitness in embodying femininity.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":"45 1","pages":"163 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47382642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-26DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2021.1906371
Nicole Williams Barnes, C. Palczewski, Heather Nicole Lund
Abstract Lucille Ball’s 1953 testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee is a rhetorical puzzle. How was a woman with documented Communist affiliation able to avoid being blacklisted? The intertextual conflation of Lucille Ball with Lucy Ricardo provided resources to answer the charge against her and transform the conversation from one of anti-American threats to the republic to one of personal familial duty and responsibility. We argue that only through an intertextual reading of Ball’s testimony can rhetoricians understand its effectiveness. We analyze the text of her September 1953 HUAC testimony alongside episodes of I Love Lucy to reveal a Lucy Ricardo/Lucille Ball palimpsest and reveal how Ball made her innocence-because-of-feminine-ignorance argument achieve narrative fidelity and probability. The case also presents an interesting example of where a retreat from the political to the personal served to thwart public persecution for political actions.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-26DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2021.1941465
P. Johnson
Abstract This essay reads the 2018 remake of the vigilante film Death Wish (directed by Eli Roth). Situating the film within the ideological context of postracialism and the proximate context of the Movement for Black Lives, #MeToo, anti-gun activism, and the Trump presidency, I suggest that the film figures Chicago as a racial threat to white, feminized, suburban life. Mostly dispensing with conventional racial markers, Roth’s film paints Chicago as a space of immiseration and death to generate a racialized threat of sexual assault, conjuring an uncanny scene of sexual violence followed by a lynching. The film models postracial sovereignty, a model of authority constantly producing death to ward off the threat of Blackness and preserve the white and masculine prerogatives of political liberalism. The film illustrates how political liberalism wields the threat of death to attempt the suppression of antiracist, feminist rebellions offering understandings of life that diverge from liberalism’s white masculinity.
本文读的是2018年翻拍的治安维持电影《死亡之愿》(由伊莱·罗斯执导)。把这部电影置于后种族主义的意识形态背景下，以及黑人生命运动(Movement for Black Lives)、#MeToo运动、反枪支激进主义和特朗普总统任期的近景背景下，我认为这部电影把芝加哥描绘成对白人、女性化的郊区生活的种族威胁。罗斯的电影基本上摒弃了传统的种族标记，把芝加哥描绘成一个贫困和死亡的空间，以产生一种种族化的性侵犯威胁，让人联想到一个不可思议的性暴力场景，然后是私刑。这部电影模拟了后种族主权，一种不断制造死亡的权威模式，以抵御黑人的威胁，维护政治自由主义的白人和男性特权。这部电影展示了政治自由主义如何利用死亡的威胁来试图压制反种族主义和女权主义的反叛，这些反叛提供了与自由主义的白人男子气概不同的生活理解。
{"title":"Fear of a Black City: Gender and Postracial Sovereignty in Death Wish (2018)","authors":"P. Johnson","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.1941465","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1941465","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay reads the 2018 remake of the vigilante film Death Wish (directed by Eli Roth). Situating the film within the ideological context of postracialism and the proximate context of the Movement for Black Lives, #MeToo, anti-gun activism, and the Trump presidency, I suggest that the film figures Chicago as a racial threat to white, feminized, suburban life. Mostly dispensing with conventional racial markers, Roth’s film paints Chicago as a space of immiseration and death to generate a racialized threat of sexual assault, conjuring an uncanny scene of sexual violence followed by a lynching. The film models postracial sovereignty, a model of authority constantly producing death to ward off the threat of Blackness and preserve the white and masculine prerogatives of political liberalism. The film illustrates how political liberalism wields the threat of death to attempt the suppression of antiracist, feminist rebellions offering understandings of life that diverge from liberalism’s white masculinity.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":"45 1","pages":"232 - 253"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/07491409.2021.1941465","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59464038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-26DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2021.1941464
E. Bloomfield, Sara C. VanderHaagen
Abstract For decades, feminists have observed a double bind in commemorations of women who attempt to enter male-designated places: Women must simultaneously be honored as rightfully occupying those places and yet noted as worthy of unique commendation as women. This essay examines how these challenges are negotiated rhetorically in biography collections about women scientists produced for children and adolescents. We perform a rhetorical analysis of such collections to explore how they complicate demarcations of what counts as science and who counts as a scientist. While these collections challenge gendered assumptions, many also reinforce divisions between men and women in order to celebrate the unique achievements of women scientists. Combining scholarship on feminist public memory and tropes in the rhetoric of science, we argue that the biography collection creators rely upon placial topoi, both metaphorical and literal, to recover and celebrate women scientists in the scientific canon and in public memory.
{"title":"Where Women Scientists Belong: Placing Feminist Memory in Biography Collections for Children","authors":"E. Bloomfield, Sara C. VanderHaagen","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.1941464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1941464","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract For decades, feminists have observed a double bind in commemorations of women who attempt to enter male-designated places: Women must simultaneously be honored as rightfully occupying those places and yet noted as worthy of unique commendation as women. This essay examines how these challenges are negotiated rhetorically in biography collections about women scientists produced for children and adolescents. We perform a rhetorical analysis of such collections to explore how they complicate demarcations of what counts as science and who counts as a scientist. While these collections challenge gendered assumptions, many also reinforce divisions between men and women in order to celebrate the unique achievements of women scientists. Combining scholarship on feminist public memory and tropes in the rhetoric of science, we argue that the biography collection creators rely upon placial topoi, both metaphorical and literal, to recover and celebrate women scientists in the scientific canon and in public memory.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":"45 1","pages":"187 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/07491409.2021.1941464","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48651753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-21DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2021.1911895
S. Mikkelsen, Sarah Kornfield
Abstract GirlDefined Ministries is a flourishing multiplatform purity ministry developed by Texan sisters Kristen Clark and Bethany Beal. Clark and Beal’s goal for GirlDefined Ministries is to develop a sisterhood that encourages women and girls to find their identity in what they imagine as God’s design for femininity. Analyzing this discourse, we demonstrate how it mobilizes White supremacist strategies that have long nationalist histories within White Christian rhetoric in the United States. Moreover, we demonstrate how these strategies manifest in discourse through a particularly patriarchal version of femininity—thus, the sexism we identify in GirlDefined Ministries reinforces racial privilege for White people. Ultimately, we illustrate how this ministry utilizes rhetorical styles that first draw girls and women into an identity we describe as “pure White womanhood” and then deploy this identity on the front lines of the Christian culture wars.
{"title":"Girls Gone Fundamentalist: Feminine Appeals of White Christian Nationalism","authors":"S. Mikkelsen, Sarah Kornfield","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.1911895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1911895","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract GirlDefined Ministries is a flourishing multiplatform purity ministry developed by Texan sisters Kristen Clark and Bethany Beal. Clark and Beal’s goal for GirlDefined Ministries is to develop a sisterhood that encourages women and girls to find their identity in what they imagine as God’s design for femininity. Analyzing this discourse, we demonstrate how it mobilizes White supremacist strategies that have long nationalist histories within White Christian rhetoric in the United States. Moreover, we demonstrate how these strategies manifest in discourse through a particularly patriarchal version of femininity—thus, the sexism we identify in GirlDefined Ministries reinforces racial privilege for White people. Ultimately, we illustrate how this ministry utilizes rhetorical styles that first draw girls and women into an identity we describe as “pure White womanhood” and then deploy this identity on the front lines of the Christian culture wars.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":"44 1","pages":"563 - 585"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/07491409.2021.1911895","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41641792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-13DOI: 10.1080/07491409.2021.1947925
Wenxue Zou, C. Wallis
Abstract In this article, we examine the cultural and gendered understandings of labor pain and the underlying obstacles that prevent Chinese women from seeking pain relief during labor and exercising their own autonomy. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of 178 posts containing the phrase wutong fenmian (literally “painless labor”) on Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging platform. By situating our analysis in the contemporary context we call “neo/non-liberal China,” where traditional Chinese thought, market socialism, and a therapeutic mode of governance intertwine, we identify four major themes: traditional thinking rooted in Confucianism; health concerns for mother and child; women’s empowerment and control of reproduction; and structural issues within China’s healthcare system. We argue that Weibo discourses reflect young women’s resistance to Chinese traditional gender ideologies and reveal their strong yearning for self-determination and self-care even as their reproductive “choice” is limited by numerous relational and institutional constraints.
{"title":"“Why do They Want Others to Suffer the Same Pain They Have Endured?” Weibo Debates about Pain Relief during Childbirth in Neo/Non-Liberal China","authors":"Wenxue Zou, C. Wallis","doi":"10.1080/07491409.2021.1947925","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2021.1947925","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this article, we examine the cultural and gendered understandings of labor pain and the underlying obstacles that prevent Chinese women from seeking pain relief during labor and exercising their own autonomy. We conducted a critical discourse analysis of 178 posts containing the phrase wutong fenmian (literally “painless labor”) on Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging platform. By situating our analysis in the contemporary context we call “neo/non-liberal China,” where traditional Chinese thought, market socialism, and a therapeutic mode of governance intertwine, we identify four major themes: traditional thinking rooted in Confucianism; health concerns for mother and child; women’s empowerment and control of reproduction; and structural issues within China’s healthcare system. We argue that Weibo discourses reflect young women’s resistance to Chinese traditional gender ideologies and reveal their strong yearning for self-determination and self-care even as their reproductive “choice” is limited by numerous relational and institutional constraints.","PeriodicalId":46136,"journal":{"name":"Womens Studies in Communication","volume":"45 1","pages":"143 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42573000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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