Layered Motherhood for Chinese Mother Bloggers: A Feminist Foucauldian Analysis

This project approaches motherhood as layered, conditioned, and multivalent against the background of the one-child policy in China. Through close readings of blogs maintained and posted by Chinese mother bloggers at www.sina.com.cn, I foreground the complexities of their subjectivities. Drawing mainly from different schools of feminist thinkers and Michel Foucault, subjectivities are understood as fluid, constituted, and becoming. Therefore, this book highlights the interconnectivity between Chinese nation, the discourse of population in China, Chinese women and their children, and the nexus of power and knowledge in the age of biopower. Chinese women?s bodies are disciplined because of the discursive links between nation, population and Chinese women. However, the poor, victimized object is not the only identity Chinese women have. They have initiated an active self-formation to normalize the one-child policy and to disrupt the prescribed gender roles.