My first book, The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Transformation of Industrial China, is forthcoming with University of California Press.
| The Fabric of Care traces China’s changing political economy through the lens of women’s work. Drawing on the case of Zhengzhou, formerly a socialist textile mill town and now the world’s largest iPhone production center, I develop a new theoretical framework in understanding the relationship between care work and political economy. Combining state archives, oral histories, and factory ethnography, I shows how institutional and grassroots actors repeatedly fought over the classification of women’s work, giving rise to distinct regimes that vary in the valuation and provision of care. Bringing feminist political economy into conversation with critical China studies, The Fabric of Care provincializes social reproduction theories while upending the socialism–capitalism binary, showing how both systems put economic accumulation over social life and why both are prone to crisis. |
