The Uncertain Body: Lin Tianmiao’s Mother Machine and Postsocialist Biopolitics

Abstract

The uncanny maternal bodies staged in Lin Tianmiao’s installations are an entryway to investigating the shifting relationship between women and the state, reproduction and production in post-Mao China. Situating her work at the intersection of gender, labor, and biogovernance complicates the overly simplistic feminist reading of her installations and reveals how her. obsession with bodily transformation intimates new forms of surplus and exploitation enabled by biotech. I argue that Lin’s rendition of the precarious female body captures Chinese society’s paranoia about bioinsecurity, showing that the flesh has become a site where the state monitors and remakes its subjects.