Chinese Women’s Reproductive Justice and Social Media

ABSTRACT

By utilizing rhetorical analysis with a focus on agency and feminist rhetoric, this article focuses on China’s most popular pregnancy and mothering app – Babytree – to examine how users assume the mantle of technical writers, writing their pregnant and mothering experiences into online narratives and selling them to generate income. This article shows how Chinese women take advantage of the technical affordances of Babytree to share their embodied experiences and, in so doing, respond to and push back against the traditional norms of motherhood and healthcare provision. The women whose experiences are examined here participate in social media as a way to reenter job markets by using their embodied experiences, thus asserting their rhetorical agency politically and economically while implicitly critiquing the traditional situation of contemporary pregnant women and the state of motherhood in China.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminisms
• motherhood
• social media
• embodiment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hua Wang

Hua Wang, Ph.D, is a scholar whose research focuses on the rhetoric of healthcare and medicine and technical communication, particularly in the Chinese context.