(De-)Materializing the Reproductive Body

Abstract

This essay examines the multilayered configuration of feminized labor in the Chinese government’s development of family planning policies over the past six decades. It argues that an analysis of the term “labor” is especially compelling in its encapsulation of the female body’s response to China’s paradoxical demand—its physical effort to maintain virginity or sexual untaintedness by guarding itself against “unauthorized” male penetration while simultaneously preparing itself as a fertile ground that promises the reproductive potential to carry on a lineage of life. Furthermore, in addition to the corporeal efforts to maintain reproductive capacity, “labor” also refers to the very activation of femininity that undergirds the “becoming” of Chinese women. It is in the materialization of the female body that Chinese femininity assumes shape, at once turning into a kind of “reproductive matter” and becoming a symbolic figure of national prosperity.In this essay, I also turn to the aesthetic as a site in which labor is redefined as the visceral and violent destruction, reconfiguration, or upholding of physical boundaries that keep the notion of femininity intact. I orient my analysis around three pieces of artworks by Danqi Cai, whose anti-natalist contemplations on childbirth, maternity, and biopolitical control in China transpire her radical rethinking of death as an anti-futurist act that de-materializes the body and removes it from its social and political entanglements.