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Layered Motherhood for Chinese Mother Bloggers: A Feminist Foucauldian Analysis

Zhang, Yahui
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1213368097

Abstract Details

2008, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, Communication Studies.
This is an exploratory attempt at understanding motherhood as layered, conditioned, and multivalent against the background of the one-child policy in China. Through close readings of blogs maintained and posted by Chinese mother bloggers at www.sina.com.cn, I foreground the complexities of their subjectivities. What is significant about blogs for the purpose of my study is that they are increasingly being used by networks of middle-class urban Chinese parents, and specifically by women. Drawing mainly from Michel Foucault and different schools of feminist thinkers, subjectivities are understood as fluid, constituted, and becoming. Therefore, this dissertation highlights the interconnectivity between Chinese nation, the discourse of population in China, Chinese women and their children, and the nexus of power and knowledge in the age of biopower. It also centers on the normative, constitutive, and regulatory power of gender and sexuality on Chinese mother bloggers as exemplified by their glorification of motherhood and everyday practices in nurturing and disciplining their young. However, in the midst of conforming and reproducing dominant discourses on gender and sexuality, Chinese mother bloggers are also engaged in the technology of the self through the diligent act of blogging, thus fostering new modes of existence and relationships and exerting their agency in context.
Radhika Gajjala, PhD (Committee Chair)
John Warren, PhD (Committee Member)
Ellen Gorsevski, PhD (Committee Member)
L. Thomas Andrews, PhD (Committee Member)
196 p.
Communication
Chinese women; blogging; quality child; motherhood; sexuality; blogging and technologies of the self

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Zhang, Y. (2008). Layered Motherhood for Chinese Mother Bloggers: A Feminist Foucauldian Analysis [Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1213368097

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Zhang, Yahui. Layered Motherhood for Chinese Mother Bloggers: A Feminist Foucauldian Analysis. 2008. Bowling Green State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1213368097.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Zhang, Yahui. "Layered Motherhood for Chinese Mother Bloggers: A Feminist Foucauldian Analysis." Doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1213368097

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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© 2008, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Bowling Green State University and OhioLINK.