Description
Abstract:
In contemporary urban China, the state’s shift toward pronatalist governance, exemplified by the Three-Child Policy, has transformed the reproductive body into a highly politicised vessel for nationalist anxieties. Against a backdrop of deep welfare retrenchment, the state has outsourced social reproduction to the family and market, leading middle-class women to navigate a hyper-commercialised postnatal care landscape. While urban mothers purchasing luxury postpartum care (sitting the month) services appear on the surface to be “empowered consumers”, this paper problematises this assumed privilege. By focusing on the embodiment of femininity, power, and agency, I investigate how structural abandonment operates directly on and through the postpartum body within the private and commercial spheres. I explore how the maternal body is fragmented, monitored, and disciplined by a regime of motherhood metrics and beauty norms. Mothers constantly negotiate a somatic double-bind: fulfilling Confucian kinship obligations of maternal self-sacrifice while simultaneously satisfying the neoliberal mandate of the autonomous, self-improving subject who undergoes rigorous body-contouring, abdominal binding, and lactation optimisation. However, I also demonstrate how consumption functions as an embodied, tactical responsiveness to structural constraints.
This paper rejects the reductionist framework that reads luxury beauty and comfort practices solely as vectors of patriarchal or neoliberal discipline, instead illuminating the friction and nuance of maternal agency. I argue that the commercial beauty regimes frequently double as hard-won “me-time”, a vital spatial and temporal refuge from the exhausting demands of intensive mothering and conflicted intergenerational family dynamics. Rather than representing passive ingestion or neat resistance, these bodily practices constitute an active negotiation of power. The women are also reflexive, critically recognising how these aesthetic standards reinforce oppressive gender norms, yet they selectively deploy them to reclaim bodily ownership and mental boundaries. By mapping these micro-politics, this paper expands feminist conceptualisations of agency beyond the linear, “action-oriented chooser”. I demonstrate that reproductive agency is fluid and multidimensional: practised not only through overt resistance and consumption, but through calculated domestic strategising, a conscious surrendering to physical incapacity, and the radical act of doing nothing reclaiming the right to rest.