Yige Dong
Assistant Professor
University at Buffalo
Assistant Professor
University at Buffalo
Collective Care and Its Discontents: The Politics of Social Reproduction in China under State Socialism
Based on archival and oral history research, this talk unpacks the Chinese Communist Party’s rhetoric about “collectivizing care” and explains how this radical approach to doing care was being unfolded on the ground in the first decade of the People’s Republic (1949-1962). By showing both differences and striking commonalities between the capitalist and socialist systems of doing care, this talk sheds light on a new vision about care work that goes beyond the Cold-War paradigm yet without losing careful scrutiny of both the roles of the authoritarian state and capital in transforming gendered social life.
Yige Dong is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests include feminist political economy, labor, social movements, and comparative-historical methods. Dong is the author of the book-in-progress, The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Industrial China, which examines the century-long transformation of care work among the Chinese working-class. Her articles analyzing labor, work, and feminist movements in China have appeared in Critical Sociology, International Review of Social History, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Critical Asian Studies, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, among others.