Cecilia Milwertz

Activism Against Domestic Violence in the People's Republic of China

This article is concerned with nongovernmental or popular activism against domestic violence in the Peoples Republic of China. The article focuses on how three factors—first, the political context; second, 10 years of activist experience; and finally, international exchange—have influenced and formed activism from the early 1990s to the present. The article addresses the following questions: (a) How and why did activism against domestic violence emerge as an issue addressed by new forms of organizing? (b) How has international interaction influenced and inspired understandings of and action against violence against women? (c) What forms of domestic and international constraints and support have activists encountered?

The Relational and Intra-active Becoming of Nongovernment-initiated Organizing in the People’s Republic of China

Abstract In this article, we propose a theoretical framework for understanding a type of organizing in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) which is often defined as “non-governmental.” We are inspired by critical feminist writings on the production of knowledge. We draw on geographer Doreen Massey’s conceptualization of space, physicist Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism and notion of “intra-action,” and grounded theorist Adele Clarke’s understanding of context. Our analysis is based on the case of the Yunnan Reproductive Health Research Association, an organization approaching the issue of gender from the perspective of reproductive health. We contend that the organization is entangled with foreign development aid donor organizations and party-state institutions and that the three entities (the association, donor organizations, and party-state institutions) lack independent, self-contained existence in their joint involvement in performatively bringing the knowledge and practice of what we call nongovernment-initiated organizing into being. Our position is that, while donors and party-state, respectively, may have vested interests in claiming separation from nongovernmentinitiated organizations, academic analysis need not, and should not, uncritically replicate that particular representation of separation. Nongovernment-initiated organizing is local and “Chinese,” in the sense that it is territorially situated in the PRC. We argue that the “local” phenomenon of bottom-up organizing is not closed or self-constitutive. On the contrary, it is relational, and the relations involve the intra-active entanglement not only with the domestic party-state but also with foreign development aid donors.

Masculine Modernity Trumps Feminine Tradition: A Gendered Capacity-building Operation in China

Abstract This article analyzes the case of a capacity-building technology offered by two North American organizations to a non-governmental organization (NGO) in the People’s Republic of China. The analysis responds to calls for critical investigation of the practices of development agencies, and questions the roots of the so-called NGO-ization practices that aim to create modern and sustainable NGOs according to new public management paradigms. The two United States (US)-based organizations that were offering capacity building, and the Chinese NGO that was receiving it, were all strongly committed to addressing gender issues and practicing gender awareness. Drawing on Sandra Harding’s understanding of the gender coding of modernity, we argue that the capacity-building process was nevertheless implemented with a paradoxical lack of gender awareness. We suggest that recognition of gender as an implicit element of modernity—in this case, in the form of a masculine-coded, capacity-building technology—may serve as a possible entry point to challenging the unequal global North–South relations and the valorization of Western knowledge.

A New Generation of Sino-Nordic Gender Matters

The papers in this issue of NORA stem from the sixth Sino-Nordic Gender Studies Network conference Age, Agency, Ambiguity—gender and generation in times of change. The first network conference was held in 2002. Since then, gender studies scholars from China, the Nordic region, and other parts of the world have been meeting every three years to share their work at conferences held by dedicated hosts in both China and Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. The aim has been to present and discuss research on the separate geopolitical entities of China and the Nordic countries (whether as separate countries or as one joint region). Scholars in China made the initial request to meet with Nordic gender studies scholars, and since then scholars from both parts of the world have engaged enthusiastically with each other. Nonetheless, the exchange has also been somewhat lopsided in so far as the interest on the Nordic side has mainly been from scholars whose object of study is China rather than phenomena in the Nordic countries. Now something new is emerging. This something new is, as R.W. Connell wrote in 1993 about how studies of men and masculinities had appeared over a period of 25 years, bubbling up! I like the expression. It describes so very nicely how things can begin with bubbles that burst and seem like nothing. Until things change, and everyone realizes that something important has in fact happened. In this position paper, I am concerned with the implications for Nordic gender studies of China’s increasing presence and influence, both globally and specifically in the Nordic region. I speak from an outsider position as a long-time China studies scholar troubled by the separate nation-state research that has been predominant at network conferences, but also immensely encouraged by work being done by gender studies scholars on the inseparabilities between China and the Nordic region. Political and economic interactions and the form and degree of separateness between these two parts of the world are in the process of changing significantly. Sino-Nordic economic, and hence also political, connections are becoming intertwined in new ways. China studies scholars are of course following these developments closely. Moreover, scholars in political science, sociology, and other disciplines are increasingly giving their attention to China, and also to China’s presence in the Nordic countries. This knowledge production needs the particular strengths and foci of gender studies. Let me start with something that is readily observable—the immediately obvious presence of material goods from China. The everyday presence of China in a US household is somewhat amusingly portrayed in the book A Year Without “Made in