Mothering for the nation? Middle-class motherhood in contemporary China

Since China’s shift from socialism to neoliberal market economy, starting in the 1980s, state rhetoric emphasises ‘traditional’ Confucian values, including family values and women’s naturalised role as carers. In their central role in the family, women are seen as key to national stability. Research on women in contemporary Chinese nation-building, however, is limited and motherhood not directly addressed. In my thesis, I focus on individual, popular and state discourses on womanhood and motherhood and the imagining of women’s social roles as pivoting on the tension between their simultaneous roles as primary caregivers and productive workers. The research aim is to explore how contemporary individual, popular and state discourses value certain kind(s) of womanhood and motherhood and what this means for women’s lived realities. I address this by asking how motherhood and women’s social roles are constructed in contemporary individual, popular and state discourses; and how neoliberal governmentality affects women’s lived realities in a hypercompetitive society.
I conducted thematic and feminist critical discourse analysis of the TV dramas ‘A Love for Dilemma’ (2021) and ‘Nothing but Thirty’ (2020) and interviewed 31 urban middle-class women. I use state policies, political speeches, and media accounts as supporting data. I draw on Foucault’s (1978, 1991a,b) concepts of governmentality, discipline and biopower to unpack individual and media discourses on womanhood and motherhood. I use Anthias and Yuval-Davis’s (1989) framework for addressing women’s participation in nation-building, supplemented with Fraser’s (2016) theorisation of social reproduction to expand on how women’s participation in nation-building encompasses care work and education. Addressing motherhood in relation to neoliberal governmentality and nation-building widens scholarly understandings of gender politics in contemporary China. My research contributes to feminist research methodologies in authoritarian settings, demonstrating how a multi-methods approach can provide a multifaceted view of social phenomena.