Description
Book SynopsisThis book explores the link between the everyday relations of gender and the reform of the rural political economy in the 1980's, and argues that the reconstitution of the Chinese state in the reform era draws force and authority from the inherent politics and power of gender.
Trade Review"In challenging the approaches of standard studies of the rural economy in China, Judd makes some important theoretical contributions to topical debates in contemporary Chinese studies . . . Judd's skill in articulating the complexities, tensions, and inconsistencies between difference, and often gendered, readings of women's various activities within the village economy makes this book additionally rewarding." --
Journal of Peasant Studies"Ellen Judd's exploration of gender and power in three Shandong villages richly deserves its generalizing title. This is not village ethnography, but a precise anatomy of the political-economic processes that constitute gender in contemporary rural China . . . For Judd, the question of how we are to think about Chinese gender is answered by situating women's productive and reproductive work in the complex force-field generated by a changing political economy. To do this requires the theoretically informed, locally detailed, and comparative attention to observable human beings that Judd gives us here. This extraordinary book is a new classic in China studies and gender analysis." --
American Anthropologist"An important contribution to our understanding of post-1978 rural China, with major implications for both women and men." --
American Journal of Sociology
Table of Contents
A note on measures and family terms; 1. Introduction: on virtue; 2. Dividing the land; 3. Village enterprise(s); 4. Socialist commodity production; 5. 'Households': between state and family; 6. Women and agency; 7. Gender and power in rural north China; Notes; Works cited; Index.
