Contenu du sommaire : Medicine, Care, and Gender in Contemporary China

This article examines the development of China's autism kangfu industry through a feminist lens, revealing how the state's biopolitical project of disability governance operates through patriarchal structures. Based on content analysis, interviews, and fieldwork primarily in Guangdong Province, it highlights the infrastructural contributions of mothers and female practitioners. This study demonstrate how this industry bridges the resource gap through mobilising gendered labour that has reshaped kangfu, which focuses on enhancing social, linguistic, cognitive, and self-care skills in autistic children into a hybrid practice intertwining therapy, care, and intimacy, distancing it from Western technical-disciplinary models. However, the industry's pursuit of professionalisation has led to the technocratisation of kangfu, marginalising the female practitioners' embodied knowledge of kangfu and intensifying mothers' cognitive burdens.

Our research on in vitro fertilisation (IVF) centres in China shows that hysteroscopy diagnosis and surgery have been routinised as a key requirement for many women before their embryo implantation. This is especially the case if women have a history of miscarriage, abortion, and repeated failures of IVF cycles. The adoption of hysteroscopy in IVF treatment has led to the uterus increasingly being considered an exclusive environment for reproduction. This is further constructed by China's current natalist population policy and its new regional healthcare system. This article investigates how a woman's uterus becomes an exclusive environment for reproduction through the intervention of hysteroscopy in IVF; how hysteroscopy enables physicians to form a new identity by developing the perspective of embryos; and how the uterine environment is coproduced with the healthcare industry. This research therefore speaks to wider scholarship in feminist anthropology and the anthropology of visual reproductive technologies. The direct visualisation of the uterus both enables and confirms a modern medical culture that believes that the mother and the foetus tend to be in conflict, and that women must therefore do everything they can to assist the embryo to stay alive and develop. Hysteroscopy enables the construction and scientific confirmation of a view of the uterus as soil and of the embryos as seeds, and realises this metaphor in actual medical practice.

This article studies the gendered hierarchies of medical culture and organisation, analysing how they combine with and contribute to reproducing gender hierarchies of social reproduction. Using the theoretical framework of feminist geography and science and technology studies, this article demonstrates how the Chinese medical workplace is a realm of gendered power relations. This paper utilises the emerging field of reproductive genetics consultation as a case study, and draws upon participant observation conducted in a hospital in Southwest China and in-depth interviews with female physicians. It investigates the strategies employed by female physicians to confront hierarchies and inequalities, examining how they navigate masculinised medical environments and empower themselves by establishing alternative professional social networks, following the multidisciplinary requirements of obstetrics and the practical potentials of molecular technologies. In this way, they elaborate their own agency and creatively produce particular approaches of consultancy in genetic-based medical practices. Moving beyond analyses of gendered discrimination that assume a binary framework and thereby echo patriarchal conceptions, the article studies the fluid, unfixed, and provisional nature of gender by situating it within a complex spatial context enriched with specific sociocultural and technological inscriptions. 

Since the end of China's One-child policy in 2015, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) has emerged as a state-supported response to declining birth rates, with several regions incorporating it into healthcare insurance. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in three fertility centres in Shanghai, the article reveals how clinical practices and patient interactions emphasise egg quality as the primary determinant of reproductive success, marginalising the role of sperm. This clinical emphasis on eggs translated into a gendered sense of responsibility, with women frequently encountering greater physical and emotional burdens in the fertility process. These dynamics corresponded to broader social expectations and were reinforced in many of our fieldwork observations. The article argues that these IVF practices in China reinforce existing gender norms, projecting them onto the cellular level and constructing reproductive responsibility as predominantly female. Through these processes, IVF reconfigures gendered identities in ways that reflect and intensify societal norms around reproduction.

This paper analyses the national-level intangible cultural heritage (ICH) stone carving in Quyang, Hebei Province, by adopting a critical heritage approach. It extends the value of existing research on ICH commoditisation and localised authorised heritage discourse (AHD) by showing how entrepreneurs who are also local cultural practitioners play a significant role in enhancing the official heritage discourse. Specifically, it examines how prominent entrepreneurs, in collaboration with the government and academic institutions, contribute to enhancing AHD by emphasising artistic and economic value. This collaboration contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the interaction between economic capital and heritage discourse. It reveals a broader trend in which economic capital significantly impacts social capital and cultural acknowledgement, thereby bolstering official AHD on the role of stone carving in poverty alleviation and cultural industry expansion. It also highlights how this AHD idealises heritage, often overlooking its inherent diversity and the various values that encompass economic resilience, emotion, communal memory, and identity. Finally, I illustrate how locals gravitate towards AHD despite their ambivalence and disagreements with the selection criteria endorsed by official discourse.

This article examines how Chinese LGBT individuals experienced intensified marginalisation during the Covid-19 pandemic, arguing that queer life under lockdown was shaped by what we term “layered exception” – a condition produced by the intersection of state lockdown governance and heteronormative domestic discipline. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 55 queer individuals and HIV/AIDS NGO workers, alongside online observations from various LGBT forums, the study identifies three key findings. First, under China's stringent lockdown policies, LGBT individuals were subjected to a new regime of control – “home-as-the-rule” – in which the heteronormative family, rather than the state, became the primary site of surveillance, coercion, and moral discipline. Second, the prolonged lockdown disrupted everyday “technologies of the self,” suspending flexible identity expression, cross-border mobility and intimate autonomy. Digital intimacy practices such as textual love and flirtatious banter emerged as alternative forms of connection, amid heated online tensions between “lying flat” advocates normalising everyday risk and “zero-Covid” supporters endorsing state-imposed restraint. Third, the medical precarity faced by HIV-positive men who have sex with men (MSM) reveals an additional layer of exception: these individuals were not only excluded from familial and state recognition, but were also rendered invisible within China's public health infrastructure, placing them at risk of being effectively “left to die.” Taken together, these findings demonstrate how the lockdown deepened queer precarity in China.

This article explores the transformation of the Lake Hotel, a state-owned danwei in Nanning, from 1952 to 2019, tracing its decline amid economic and political shifts. It situates the evolution of danwei institutions within China's transition from a planned to a market economy, highlighting the impact of privatisation, labour restructuring, and changing political ideologies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and historical analysis, it first analyses workers' trajectories and aspirations, career stagnation, and declining job stability inside the danwei; then the evolution of culinary practices, from mass catering for elites to creative yet constrained “ethnic cuisine”; and finally, the growing politicisation of the hotel's mission and its adaptation to anti-corruption policies. This study argues that rather than disappearing, the danwei has been reshaped by neoliberal and authoritarian forces, balancing economic survival with ideological legitimacy. Through an analysis of the interplay between culinary innovation and sociopolitical constraints through time, the Lake Hotel serves as a case study of the way state-owned institutions navigate market pressures while maintaining their political role, offering insight into broader transformations in China's labour and consumption landscapes.