Please note: This event was originally scheduled for 2/8 and has been moved to 2/15. 

Presenter: Anna Zhao, GWSS Ph.D. Student
Moderator: Ramon Johnson, Ph.D. Student

In this colloquium, GWSS Graduate Student, Anna Zhao, will discuss women's reproductive labor in socialist China through the lens of bodily pain related to childbirth. From 1952 to 1953, China's National Health Bureau distributed a document to initiate a movement promoting the 'psychoprophylactic method of painless childbirth' (PPM) method developed by Soviet scientists. The PPM method was named “painless childbirth(无痛分娩, wutongfenmian)” and localized to adapt into state’s building of new citizens. This non-pharmaceutical approach associated labor pain of childbirth with oppression of the feudal past, and "relieving pain" became a promise of socialist modernization. Zhao will also discuss the phenomenon of uterus prolapse during the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s, as well as examine how women's productive labor and the undervaluation of women's reproductive labor contributed to the neglect of women's postpartum health. By drawing attention to the visibility and  invisibility of reproduction related pain in socialist China, this presentation will explore how female reproductive bodies embodied China's socialist revolutions, and the instability in the making of "妇女"(funv, women) in post 1949 China.