Preparing Female Bodies for More: Soft Governance of Reproduction in China’s Transitioning Reproductive Policies

• In Event: 30658 - Reproductive Surveillance and Clinical Policing

Abstract

China’s one-child policy has been lifted since 2016 in the face of declining fertility rates and an aging demography. With the ending of direct, forced regulation on reproduction, how does the state facilitate the willingness to reproduce and the modernization of demography? With the case of newly founded “warm wards” at the obstetrics department of Jiang City Central Hospital and Jiang City Maternal and Child Health Hospital, this paper reveals a covet reconfiguration of meanings, discourse, and anticipation of reproduction in a medical setting. We found that hospitals, as the front stage of biopower and the agents of the state, have altered discourses surrounding childbirth pain, reshaped the “scientific” view of reproductive bodies, and symbolically extended the fertility policy to women’s homes. Through the redefinition directed by scientism and renegotiation around reproduction, the bodies, minds, and environments of pregnant women are prepared to have a second or third kid. The “preparation” points to an underexplored practical dimension of state biopower, which is conceptualized as a part of “soft governance.”

Authors

• Siyi Huang, Tsinghua University

• Yingyu Zang, University of Virginia