Abstract
Domestic violence (DV) affects over a third of Chinese women in a relationship. Focusing on ethnographic data from six staff members and six DV survivors at a rural, state-affiliated women’s center in China in 2010, this article relies on Henrietta Moore’s notion of the poststructuralist gendered subject to examine how the staff draw on discourses about gender and social harmony in persuading women to stay in their marriages, rather than on human rights discourses that emphasize survivor safety. It shows that DV survivors are frequently sent back to dangerous homes where their health is placed at risk.
Introduction
Domestic violence (DV) constitutes a serious human rights violation and endangerment of health that is associated with death, physical injury, emotional suffering, and psychiatric illness, including depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (Bonomi et al., 2009; Rees et al., 2011). While a great deal of attention has been paid to human rights abuses committed by the Chinese state against political, ethnic, and religious dissidents (Human Rights Watch, 2014), it is important to emphasize the human rights abuses against women who experience DV (whom we refer to as DV survivors), who rarely receive widespread media attention internationally.
DV as a human rights concept has only come to exist in China since the 1990s with the importation from the western feminist movement of such ideas at the 1995 United Nations Women’s Conference in Beijing, around which time the term baoli for public acts of violence supplanted the term nuedai used for abuse within the home (Milwertz, 2003). According to the most recent data from November 2014 from the All China Women’s Federation (ACWF), 39% of Chinese women aged 18 to 49 who have ever been with a partner have experienced physical or sexual DV (Zhao, 2014). Of the women who experienced DV, only 35% informed their families and only 7% reported an incident to the police (Zhao, 2014). Chinese women are also found to be at increased risk of DV if they are of low educational and socioeconomic status or grew up in rural areas (Parish, Wang, Laumann, Pan, & Luo, 2004; Tang & Lai, 2008).
Despite the vulnerabilities of rural Chinese DV survivors, no studies exist that explore the specific barriers they face in accessing help at a local level. This article aims to add to the understanding of DV in rural China by focusing ethnographic and analytic attention on the everyday experiences of DV survivors at a local, state-affiliated women’s center as they encounter discursive practices that constrain their choices in leaving a violent marriage. The article shows how the discourses of gender and state harmony come to bear on the everyday engagement of local ACWF center staff with DV survivors, ultimately suppressing the DV survivor’s potential to claim human rights.
The article relies on Henrietta Moore’s (1994) notion of the poststructuralist gendered subject who engages with, complies with, or resists competing gender discourses as he or she accepts, changes, or fails various gendered positions. That is, in different moments, individuals act out various gendered positions, the meaning of which originates in discourse and discursive practices. As Moore explains, while the traditional subject of inquiry is thought to be a unified and, by default, male individual, whose identity is constituted by his external difference from all other individuals, “the post-post-structuralist subject, on the other hand, is the site of differences; differences which constitute the subject and are ‘internal’ to it” (1994, p. 58) As we will demonstrate, the staff of the women’s center intentionally appealed to the various conflicting gendered positions of the DV survivor, while socially reproducing the good wife and mother who keeps the family in one piece.
Background
Historically, China has been a patriarchal and patrilocal society where women were relegated to the domestic realm. Some of the literature on DV in China has focused heavily on the perceived victim-blaming and patriarchal cultural factors that are used to explain the high prevalence of DV among Chinese women (Shen, 2011; Tang, Wong, & Cheung, 2002). These views are described as barriers to accessing help for DV survivors (Shen, 2011; Tang et al., 2002). For example, such articles tend to explain how “the submissiveness of Chinese women within the family and the patriarchal attitudes of Chinese husbands towards their wives tend to legitimate wife beating” (Tang et al., 2002, pp. 975-976). Such arguments that focus on a static notion of Chinese women and wifehood do not do justice to the many dramatic political, economic, and social transformations that have occurred in China over the past few decades.
Ethnographies of contemporary China have shown the recent changes in the lives of Chinese women and families that have accompanied the economic liberalization since the 1980s with the increasing migration of rural men and women to cities for new economic opportunities (Chang, 2008; Oxfeld, 2010; Yuan, 2005). Such changes include shifts in power from the older to the younger generation, smaller households with less generational depth, and the growing intimacy between husband and wife (Oxfeld, 2010), not only allowing for some increasingly independent roles for women as agents taking advantage of new market opportunities as entrepreneurs and consumers but also making them vulnerable to the forces of a progressively widening rural–urban economic divide that seek to exploit their low-cost, unregulated labor (Rofel, 2007).
The 1954 Chinese Constitution and 1950 Marriage Law upheld women’s equal rights in the political, economic, cultural/educational, social, and familial arenas. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) created the state feminist organization called the ACWF, which has branch organizations at each level of government (nation, province, city, county, town, and village), to ensure that women’s interests are represented. The ACWF supervises women’s health and reproductive needs, and intervenes to protect women in cases of unfair work demands by work units, inheritance disputes, and DV. Meanwhile, Chinese women’s rights activists in the postreform era have adopted international feminist ideals of human rights standards (Keith, Lin, & Huang, 2003; Liu, 2005; Merry, 2006; Milwertz, 2003; Zhang, 2009). They tend to attribute DV to the development of new social and economic inequities as much as to perceived Chinese patriarchal culture. They often critique the failure of the ACWF to prioritize human rights while they use the ACWF’s institutional privilege, as a state-affiliated organization that sits on political committees at every level of government, to advance their own agendas (Liu, 2005; Zhang, 2009).
Structural factors contribute to the high prevalence of DV in China, including limited access to legal and medical services, a paucity of women’s shelters, and poor central political support for DV survivors (Zhang, 2009; Zhao, 2000). Rather than promoting criminalization of such violent acts, the Chinese approach has favored mediation and reconciliation, with civil protection offered to DV survivors less frequently and fewer criminal prosecutions done for perpetrators than in western countries (Zhao, 2000). While laws exist that condemn DV (the 1992 Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests or the 2001 Marriage Law, for example), Chinese women’s rights activists argued that these laws do not clearly define DV or delineate any legal means of enforcement (Keith & Lin, 2005; Zhao, 2000).
The National People’s Congress, the highest legislative body in China, finally passed a national DV law, made effective in March 2016, in the wake of a highly publicized DV case in 2011 involving a Chinese celebrity English teacher who physically abused his American wife. It defines DV as physical or psychological abuse between relatives or cohabitating nonrelatives. While in the past decade, local courts launched new small-scale reform projects to intervene in DV, such as piloting the use of restraining orders (Chen, 2013), this law removes barriers to obtaining restraining orders such as requiring a lawsuit against the perpetrator. It also creates mandated reporters in the form of police officers, healthcare providers, and social workers, rather than solely relying on women to report DV themselves. The implementation and effectiveness of this law remain to be seen.
In rural regions, resources to assist in DV have been limited to local branches of the state-affiliated ACWF, the local police, and village leaders (Liu, 2005; Zhang, 2009). As one of the staff at the rural center noted, “Fulian [Chinese name for the ACWF] is where women come if they have any problems. We are like their mother’s home (niangjia),” evoking the trope of women returning to the bosom of their natal families when mistreated by their husbands. When women sought help at the women’s center at the county where this study was performed, it was usually the last place of refuge for them after they had attempted to access help from their village ACWF representative, families, village leaders, and even the local police.
Methods
This article summarizes the first author’s 6-week engagement in full-time, ethnographic fieldwork in a rural county in Hebei province, northern China in 2011, with approval from the Institutional Review Board of the University of California at Berkeley. Participant observation captured some of the nuanced aspects of communication between the center staff and DV survivors that would be difficult to assess by other modalities. The president of an international nongovernmental organization (NGO) that had ties to this local branch of the ACWF helped the first author gain the approval of the local ACWF leadership in conducting this study.
The ethnographer was able to spend over 150 hr observing and interviewing the center staff as women from the community dropped in for advice. Key areas of interview discussion with staff included perceptions on the causes of and solutions to DV and marital conflict, and their general approach when counseling a DV survivor. When possible, she used the technique of triangulation, seeking responses from multiple interlocutors on the same question to enhance data reliability and validity. The first author is fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese, and quickly adjusted to the slightly different regional dialect. She wrote verbatim notes on the observed sessions and interviews. She recorded detailed field notes several times daily of personal observations and conversations. Notes were analyzed over the course of 2 years, using a standard, iterative coding process to identify and compile similar themes and refine various hypotheses (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Any reported names have been changed to preserve anonymity.
Given the social stigma associated with DV in China, gaining access to DV survivors could only be done through convenience sampling by working with an established organization. The sample was selected based on two criteria: The participant was either (a) a DV survivor dropping in at the women’s center, or (b) a current or former staff member of the women’s center, with both groups aged 18 years or above. We defined DV on the basis of the DV survivor’s description of any acts of physical or psychological violence that intimidated, coerced, humiliated, threatened, or injured her. We chose to call the women who detailed these acts “DV survivors,” in our desire to align with a feminist politics of representation, away from portrayals of Third World women as homogeneous, oppressed victims (Mohanty, 1988). However, we do acknowledge the problematic aspects of using the term survivor, which may attribute an unreasonable degree of agency to the women as they navigate institutional challenges, or suggest inaccurately that they have somehow already triumphed over their situations at home.
During the ethnographic period, a total of 17 women dropped in to the center for advice, of whom six women presented with concerns related to DV, four women with non-DV marital conflicts, two with elder abuse, and the remainder with conflicts over land ownership or disputes at work. Each visit lasted between 15 and 90 min. In addition to observing these sessions, the first author conducted semistructured interviews with all six counselors and ACWF leaders in their homes or offices.
The women’s center is located in a county town in Heibei province, about 2 hr by car from Beijing. The main source of income in the county was formerly agriculture, although in recent years it had developed a lucrative mining industry that created new economic inequities. The center is a county-level branch of the ACWF, which differed from most low-level branches of the ACWF, in that it had particularly active leadership. It received funding from international NGOs, was featured many times on CCTV (the state-run TV network) and in national and regional newspapers, and received provincial-level awards. It occasionally hosted educational talks in the villages to raise awareness of women’s rights. In 2002, the center launched a DV initiative that set up a legal counseling office, an injury inspection center at the county hospital, and collaboration with the local police in mediations. It had recently moved to a new, larger location that housed services for donated clothing, employment assistance, matchmaking, and microloans in addition to the activities above. During the time of observation, the center was staffed by two legal counselors and one psychological counselor under the leadership of the center manager and, above her, the county ACWF director.
The DV survivors and the center staff were Chinese women in their twenties through fifties who had grown up in the county, with the exception of one staff member who had married into the region from another province. The socioeconomic status of the DV survivors varied from one woman who was married to a factory owner and lived in comfort in an apartment in the county town to the other five women who lived in a nearby village. All of them had one child each except for two women who were childless. All DV survivors were new to the county-level center. All described some degree of physical violence, including physical intimidation, slapping, grabbing, hitting with bare hands, and beating with a stick, and four women also described emotional violence, including taunting, verbal bullying, and humiliation. Three of the women showed signs of bruising, swelling, and other injuries at the time of presentation at the center.
A main limitation of this study is that it took place at one rural center in a particular region of China, a nation with many significant economic and social regional variations. Nevertheless, this is the first study demonstrating how national gender and social harmony discourses play out at the level of a rural center. Despite the relatively small number of DV survivors, the extensive time spent with the center staff allows for meaningful understanding of their interactions with the DV survivors. The center may not be representative of most local ACWF branches given its active leadership and affiliation with international NGOs, but our findings demonstrate well the challenges faced by DV survivors and counselors, even in one of the most successful rural ACWF branches.
Gendered Positions in Discursive Practice
The staff at the center drew on many discourses in their counseling and persuasion of DV survivors, mainly gendered norms and social harmony rhetoric. The staff adopted moral positions that sometimes ratify ideals of femininity harnessed to a social harmony discourse to persuade women to return home.
Ideals of Feminine Subjectivities
Various Chinese scholars have demonstrated that ideals of Confucian womanhood emphasizing obedience, duty, and harmony within the family tend to resurface during periods marked by social mobility (Evans, 2002; Glosser, 2002; Mann, 2002). Women’s subjectivities have signified more than their own moral positions, as “during periods of rapid social change, in China as in elsewhere, women were named the guardians of morality and stability, charged with protecting the sanctuary of the family” as well as the reproduction of status and hierarchy (Mann, 2002, p. 111). Since the economic reforms of the 1980s, widespread imagery favors a modern feminine subjectivity of the obedient, considerate, and sexually appealing wife. As a staff member commented during an interview, “Some people say, ‘If you don’t have a good husband, you suffer your whole life. If a husband can’t find a good wife, they suffer three lives’. A good woman makes three generations happy,” referring to the children, husband, and in-laws.
The staff described women’s role in perpetuating the cycle of violence:
After a woman gets hit, she’ll feel victimized (weiqu) and might feel vengeful. “I worked so hard, serving (cihou) you, yet you hit me.” So she feels it’s very unequal and treats her husband worse, because what she’s giving isn’t returned. She will be less caring. The conflict will escalate because the man will think, “You’re not as good to me as before.” If no one intervenes, it will usually get worse. If he hits her once, he will hit her again. There’s a repetitive nature (fanfuxing).
While in this narrative women do not instigate the violence, their response to DV, as formed by rejection of a “caring,” obedient subjectivity, is thought to crucially contribute to its escalation.
While Henrietta Moore described the poststructuralist gendered subject as one who engages with or challenges competing gender discourses and gendered positions, staff and DV survivors at the center similarly drew on, enacted, or resisted normative gendered positions during counseling sessions. Zhixing, a woman in her early thirties, was married to a local government employee who would intimidate her by verbally bullying her and chasing her, after getting drunk at banquets for his work. Although he had made a vow to her that if he drank again, he would crash his car to kill himself, he relapsed after a month, so she presented to the center contemplating divorce. She told the counselor,
I can comfort him, but if I say one provoking thing (zijihua), he will toy with me (shuawo) to the end. People will persuade me to stay with him. He has a job, he’s otherwise good to me. They say, “If you find someone else, he’ll be like that too. All men are like that.” I think he’s psychologically different from us, he had a trauma. [The counselor asked about his parents.] His parents are failed people. He wouldn’t be like this if they went the right direction. His parents are separated. His mom has a man’s personality. She’s not tender.
Like many of the DV survivors observed, Zhixing described herself as “provoking” her husband into hurting her. However, she normalized his behavior as inherently masculine and focused on blaming their marital conflicts on the failure of her mother-in-law to perform the subjectivity of a gentle, nurturing mother, thereby traumatizing her son and causing the dissolution of both of their marriages. Her mother-in-law’s gender performativity, in Zhixing’s narrative, ultimately ruined not only her own marriage but also the entire extended family.
Some DV survivors, however, resisted calling upon the expected feminine subjectivity. Langmei was a woman in her thirties who, because of frequent violent arguments with her husband, had moved out of their home in the village to live with her young daughter in an apartment in the county town. Her husband would often come and bang loudly at the door of her apartment while cursing at her, drawing a crowd of her neighbors, until she would open the door for him. While the staff complained to me after Langmei left that she was “too stubborn,” Langmei herself even described her behavior as “over the top, provoking him” by giving this example:
The day before yesterday, he hit me, so yesterday, I wouldn’t open the door and he was yelling, kicking. Everyone heard it. The more you act this way, the less I’m inclined to open the door. If you make me look bad, I’ll make you look bad (nigeiwo haokan, wogeini haokan).
The counselor had told Langmei a story of another DV survivor well known to the center who had been beaten nearly to death many times by her husband, resulting in multiple suicide attempts. Finally, this woman could bear it no more and filed for divorce, after which her husband was diagnosed with a personality-altering brain tumor. The counselor, in narrating this story to Langmei, imparted a dramatic morality tale of a virtuous woman who attempts to preserve the unity of her marriage at the cost of her happiness and nearly her life. The staff compared her with Langmei by revealing Langmei that “she is just like you” and “you’re not at that point yet” of filing for divorce, then recommended psychological counseling for her. In doing so, the staff uplifted the other woman as the archetype against which DV survivors were asked to weigh themselves. In doing so, the counselors elevated the criteria for divorce to conditions of suffering so abject, they induce suicide attempts.
The staff often attempted to help the DV survivors by guiding them to the correct feminine subjectivity and by recommending psychological counseling to learn communication strategies. They hoped that shaping the DV survivors into ideal wives would mean an end to violence. As one staff member said,
A basic thing for women is that if you want your marriage to work, you can’t give up on yourself and on making yourself desirable. He can go out, but he comes back because you’re better. You don’t give him a marriage, you give him value, acceptance, family.
This statement reveals how the discourse on DV in China relies on an imagined kind of femininity that could obliterate all violence with self-sacrifice. The counselors tended not to discuss the kinds of masculinities that could contribute to the precipitation or amelioration of DV, nor did they condemn the male behavior in these cases, given the primary designation of women as the guardians of a stable home. A DV survivor would deserve a marriage free of violence if she were a self-aware, communicative woman who understood both the sexual and emotional desires of her husband and brightened her extended family with the contagious happiness of her marriage.
State Harmony Rhetoric
In addition to discussing gendered norms with the DV survivors, the counselors referred to state harmony rhetoric in attempting to persuade women to return to their partners. Through decades of experience working closely with the ACWF, Jin reveals how the staff faced conflicting dual demands to “take on the larger issues” (guquan daju) mandated by the CCP organization at the same administrative level and also to “speak on behalf of women’s rights and interests” (funu quanyi de daiyanren) as required by the next higher ACWF level (Jin, 2003). Because the CCP held authority over funding, promotion, and training, it often dominated the contest for the compliance of ACWF branches (Jin, 2003). As a result, local ACWF branches often promoted a social harmony rhetoric, which comprises an entire ideological system of rhetoric and policy responses to perceived social instability in the postreform era (Hsing & Lee, 2010; Yu, 2011; Zhang, 2009).
In managing their conflicting duties, most of the time, the counselors utilized the mode of persuading (quan) women to stay in their homes. As shown in this interaction between the counselor and Zhixing, the discourse implicitly supported a social harmony angle:
Counselor: In a few days you might have lots of different viewpoints (kanfa). We are young and have many days left. But consider the child, she is innocent. Zhixing: He doesn’t care about the child. He was chasing me while holding the child. There’s no guarantees [that he won’t get drunk again]. He doesn’t want to divorce me. I feel very suppressed. If I stayed too long, it wouldn’t be good for me. [Discusses concern about not getting custody of the child because she couldn’t support the child on her own.] Counselor: Family things are hard to resolve. No one is right or wrong. Things are unclear (shuobuqing). It’s about who can soften down (ruanxiaqu) and reconcile with the other person (baorong). There’s lots of cases like this that go on happily. There’s nothing you can’t face between a couple. This is better than cases in the past where the women come in with wounds all over [gestures all over her face and lips].
The rhetoric of equal responsibility in maintaining the unity of a couple neglects the often significant social and economic inequalities between the husband and wife. Two of the DV survivors vocalized concerns that they may lose custody of their children if they cannot financially support them. Although “no one is right or wrong” in persuading DV survivors to stay married, the act of reconciliation and deferring to one’s spouse becomes engendered as a “softening” and status-lowering procedure, easily naturalized as particularly suited for a woman’s obedient, pliable body and mind.
The overriding goal of this “softening” process is to promote harmony in the family, and by extension in society. As a staff member explained,
Our perspective is that if the woman is not entirely being bullied or harmed, we try our best to defuse it, at this low level of ACWF. Because there’s a Chinese tradition that if the family is harmonious, a thousand of things will go well (jiahe wanshixing). Our goal is to allow them to be happy and pass good days. It’s not a matter of, “You’re here at the Women’s Federation, so let’s divorce immediately.” We want them to stay together for the sake of the children, to give the children a complete family. It’s not like we’re the Women’s Federation, so we always favor the woman, whether she’s right or wrong, and always criticize the man. If the woman’s wrong, then we have to educate her. That’s even more our responsibility, to give her criticism and education, to help her raise her quality (suzhi), to elevate her thinking on how to love the husband, how to love the child, how to handle relationships with the mother-in-law. Those are all things that we teach.
Under the logic of social harmony, the marital pair belongs to an indivisible social unit for which the concerns of the individual matter less than “peacefully passing the days.” The main role of the ACWF here is expressed as promoting social harmony by shaping the women into the idealized subjectivity of the wife and mother discussed in the previous section.
At the center, the counselors facilitated the “softening” of the DV survivor’s mind by introducing a range of relational viewpoints. They commonly did so by asking the DV survivor to prioritize the importance of being a mother, as Zhixing was asked to do. It was generally presumed that children benefited from growing up in a unified nuclear family. The negative behavioral effects on children exposed to DV (McFarlane, Groff, O’Brien, & Watson, 2003) in the home environment did not come up. In fact, in the few cases where a DV survivor had no children, the staff more readily provided information on applying for divorce.
Another strategy was to compare the woman with other DV survivors: For example, “This is better than cases in the past where the women come in with wounds all over,” in effect, asking the woman to realize she was not as severely injured as she might have been. At times, the counselor actively brought up the matter of introducing and trying new viewpoints: “In a few days, you might have many different opinions and outlooks (kanfa) for what happened.” This statement frames DV and gender as a matter of positionality rather than inviolable rights. Briggs (2007, p. 315) has described, in his ethnography of a woman imprisoned for infanticide in Venezuela, how “constructions of discourse about violence create a very limited range of subject positions, generate standardized scripts for persons interpolated in each slot, and make it difficult to advance counternarratives” for those caught up in social scripts. At the women’s center, the counselors similarly tried to interject the DV survivors into a limited set of gendered positions as the good Chinese wife and mother.
Rather than some westernized narratives of DV survivors where the telling provides a kind of recollecting of the parts of her “self,” a making sense of the past, a restructuring of what seems to be disparate parts of their being into the construction that is now the “I” of her voiced narrative, (Lawless, 2001, p. 6)
the experience at this rural Chinese center fractures the women’s narratives. The DV survivor becomes the site of gendered differences constituted by discourses about traditional Chinese femininity and social harmony. The staff’s treatment of the DV survivors as a “post-structuralist gendered subject” taking up multiple subject positions within a range of discourses and social practices makes it more difficult to conceive of the DV survivors as a universal subject deserving of human rights.
Human Rights Ideology
Officially, the counselor was charged with privileging the best interests of the client and protecting her human rights. The mission of the women’s center included upholding women’s rights, for which they led village-level lectures for local women and children in schools. The counselors tended to endorse concepts of gender equality in their discussions with the first author on women’s rights. It is possible that the presence of the first author as a western trained student may have contributed to the counselors’ use of a discourse about the equality of the sexes. When Zhixing had prompted the counselor, “If it came to a divorce, what help can we offer?” the counselor replied, “It would have to be a lawsuit. We don’t have a lawyer, but we would go with you to court, to mediations, to look at things from what’s advantageous for you.”
The staff, however, did not meaningfully engage with the human rights ideology. For the most part, the staff offered general expressions of solidarity:
Zhixing: I really want to preserve face (mianzi). Counselor: All women do.
Such expressions depend on taken-for-grant tropes about gender while not contributing to advancing women’s rights. A possible explanation may be that the superficial level of engagement with feminism is a consequence of what Chinese feminist scholars call “gender erasure,” the sidelining of gender injustice for the greater goal of advancing a class-based revolution during the Maoist era, despite declarations of gender equality in the rhetoric of state feminism (Evans, 2002; Yang, 1999). As a result, the Chinese state tended to promote gender equality in theory while failing to address structural inequalities with regard to gender in practice.
The counselors did not incorporate human rights concepts into their interactions with DV survivors. One of the counselors best described the general approach of the staff with this statement:
I first ask what their wish is, “Do you want to keep living together or to leave?” They will give me an answer. Then I ask them, “Is this situation with the two of you together affecting your life and safety (shengming anquan)?” If it’s not threatening her life and she has feelings for him, I would persuade her to stay together.
When asked to clarify her definition of “life threatening,” she brought up either injuries qualifying as at least a “slight injury” (qinshang), verified at a forensic unit in the hospital, or the instance of malicious (elie) abuse, where “he’s hitting her like there are no feelings, like he’s a stranger to her.” The ill-defined nature of this criterion, however, is worrisome. Counselors might persuade women facing uncertain choices to return to their husbands, because DV did not meet a sufficient threshold of physical harm, rather than defending the women’s rights to protection and safety.
While some scholars may attribute the institutional practices at play to the cultural relativism of the particular context of rural China, we support a precultural notion of ethical responsibility in calling out such practices as problematic. During the first author’s 6 weeks of observation in the field, the staff never explicitly assessed the risk of the woman and any children in the home of sustaining serious harm and death from their violent marriages. Nor did they routinely offer unprompted access to resources or information about the process of undergoing a divorce, despite the center establishing this legal resource office for presumably for this very purpose. For the most part, staff did not advocate for women’s rights to leave unsafe homes or provide legal resources that would enable women to fulfill their rights.
Feminist scholars have debated whether human rights, typically seen as the domain of the universal subject framed by liberal discourse, can be compatible within the framework of the poststructuralist subject (Nash, 2002). While poststructuralist feminists tend to problematize the way that universalism and equality have come to obscure the inequities of what categories of individuals implicitly deserve such “rights” (Phillips, 1992; Rhode, 1989), Nash (2002) calls for a poststructuralist version of gender equality that she terms deconstructive equality, which relies on a standard that combines generalization and abstraction with specificity and individuality to form the critical framework upon which human rights can be sought. While it may seem that the center’s emphasis on the various gendered positions of the DV survivor may undermine the universalism that underlies the claim to rights, the category of the individual who is created and defined by women’s rights discourses constitutes one of many possible gendered positions. This particular gendered position, defined not merely by rhetoric but also by the practical means to accessing human rights, is the one that the ACWF centers should seek to support in its advocacy work.
Discussion
The center staff relied on various discursive practices related to Chinese gender and a social harmony emphasis in their interactions with DV survivors. DV is conceived of as one of innumerable potential threats to social harmony. At the same time, the ethnographic observations here show that whether a marriage is violent or not was thought to depend on the actions of both the perpetrator and DV survivor. This article posits the idea that certain women possessing an ideal subjectivity were thought to be able to sustain a marriage free of violence and the staff treated the subjectivities of DV survivors as able to be shaped, through counseling and mediation, into this idealized one. In doing so, this local office of the ACWF is neglecting its mission to uphold human rights for its clients: DV cannot be at the same time a violation of women’s safety while also serving as a reasonable response to women’s failures to fulfill an ideal gendered subjectivity. In some of the cases, including the interaction with Zhixing, for example, the center placed DV survivors in the untenable position of literally being asked to “reconsider” whether the unity of their families can lead them to view the violence of their partners as tolerable.
Wang (2010) describes the main focus of Chinese feminists in their advocacy work as obtaining access to equal rights through the politics of recognition. However, Nancy Fraser (1998) posits a feminist framework that encompasses recognition as well as distribution in its requirement for justice. The Chinese family serves as a proxy for broader anxieties for the nation, with the Chinese wife bearing the lion’s share of the responsibility for maintaining social harmony, especially at this time of great social and economic changes across the country. The discursive emphasis on preserving family unity asks questions of the broader causes of social unrest in China. How should the burden of keeping individuals and communities safe be distributed among individuals, families, institutions, and the state?
Although the center focused on promoting awareness of women’s rights in the countryside, the matter of distributive justice was rarely broached directly. Distributive justice would mean increasing access to legal resources for DV survivors in rural as well as urban regions. It would mean a reversal of the state social harmony rhetoric, so that the burdens of maintaining social stability would not rest so heavily on DV survivors. Although the first national DV law has passed, the implementation and effectiveness remain to be seen. At the same time, with increased pressure from domestic and international women’s groups, it is important to continue pushing the ACWF to prioritize its duties in protecting women’s best interests rather than the state agenda. Given the extensive reach of the ACWF, dedicated ACWF staff at every level of government appear to be the most suited personnel for improving the safety of DV survivors through the creation of DV shelters, advice offices and hotlines, and the training of staff members to prioritize safety and access to legal resources, including restraining orders. Without improvement in policies from both the central government and the ACWF, billions of Chinese women remain in danger of psychological and physical harm and death from DV.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the staff and DV survivors who participated in this study.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study received funding from the University of California Human Rights Center and the University of California at Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies, particularly the Pamela and Kenneth Fong Fellowship.