2023 - Full Presentation Schedule
Huang Shi and the New Culture Attacks on Fetal Education
Abstract
As China grappled with European and Japanese imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century, prominent intellectuals urged women to practice fetal education to save the nation by strengthening the Chinese race in utero. The ancient practice of fetal education was based on the classical Chinese medical principle that a pregnant mother could positively influence her impressionable fetus by carefully regulating her actions, emotions, and environment.
But whereas the earlier generation of modernizers promoted fetal education as a syncretic blending of Chinese tradition and Western science, by the 1930s iconoclastic New Culture activists rejected fetal education–along with many other beliefs and practices associated with traditional China–as old, superstitious, and oppressive to women.
This talk focuses on the writings of New Culture activist and social scientist Huang Shi, who uses textual analysis and scientific rhetoric to debunk the practice of fetal education. Using the vivid corporal imagery of modern medical dissection, Huang sets out to use the "sharp dissection knife" of textual analysis to “strip away the outer skin" of discourses on fetal education to lay it bare for all to see, employing a distinctly masculine scientific gaze to women's reproductive lives and bodies.
In the name of liberating women from their own backwards reproductive practices, radical men like Huang Shi ultimately reinforced the patriarchy.
Huang Shi and the New Culture Attacks on Fetal Education
CASB 108 - History, Politics, and Sociology
As China grappled with European and Japanese imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century, prominent intellectuals urged women to practice fetal education to save the nation by strengthening the Chinese race in utero. The ancient practice of fetal education was based on the classical Chinese medical principle that a pregnant mother could positively influence her impressionable fetus by carefully regulating her actions, emotions, and environment.
But whereas the earlier generation of modernizers promoted fetal education as a syncretic blending of Chinese tradition and Western science, by the 1930s iconoclastic New Culture activists rejected fetal education–along with many other beliefs and practices associated with traditional China–as old, superstitious, and oppressive to women.
This talk focuses on the writings of New Culture activist and social scientist Huang Shi, who uses textual analysis and scientific rhetoric to debunk the practice of fetal education. Using the vivid corporal imagery of modern medical dissection, Huang sets out to use the "sharp dissection knife" of textual analysis to “strip away the outer skin" of discourses on fetal education to lay it bare for all to see, employing a distinctly masculine scientific gaze to women's reproductive lives and bodies.
In the name of liberating women from their own backwards reproductive practices, radical men like Huang Shi ultimately reinforced the patriarchy.