Practising Uncooperative Feminism through Sitting: Reflecting on and Resisting Gender Hierarchy in Commercial Postpartum Care

Research has shown that selective neoliberal rationality, driven by the privatisation of the market, rather than contradicting China’s authoritarian governance, actually consolidates the state’s legitimacy. This paper explores the seemingly contradictory yet cooperative discourses prevalent in the commercialisation of postpartum care, sitting-the-month practice. Drawing on in-depth interviews with postpartum women, their families, care entrepreneurs and workers, I argue that, on the one hand, there is a strand of market discourses, by framing empowerment as consumer choices, emphasises women’s perpetual self-betterment through consumption. On the other hand, market discourses adapt to resonate with women's lived realities in order to sell services, in this case, reinforcing traditional gender roles rooted in Confucian familialism. By aligning with the state-endorsed gender arrangements, the market only provides a incoherent sense of ‘empowerment’, as well as individualised and temporary solutions, for women traversing the patriarchal script of domesticity. I contend that the individualistic and depoliticising approach to women’s empowerment does not challenge any existing political ideology, especially the legitimacy of China’s authoritarian regime. As a result, while celebrating women’s individual empowerment, the market simultaneously sustains the patriarchal order that prioritises women’s relational responsibilities. Reckoning with the discursive incoherence and contradiction, I argue, the commercial postpartum care services become a catalyst for women’s multi-layered burden juggling between their contradictory gendered subjectivities. This paper aims to reimagine sitting-the-month practice as a time for women to reflect on structural gender injustice. Through ‘sitting’, postpartum women can develop a new understanding of ‘self-care’ as an act of self-preservation, resisting the social expectation to consistently provide care, and demanding care that they frequently provide but not reciprocated. In doing so, this paper highlights an uncooperative stance against the oppressive gender arrangements.