"Bare Sticks" and Other Dangers to the Social Body: Assembling Fatherhood in China

The Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University presents a talk on fatherhood in China.

Speaker: Susan Greenhalgh, Harvard University

In China today, men’s (and their parents’) obsession with mate-finding reflects an increasingly male-heavy gender imbalance due in large part to three decades of the one-child policy enforced in the masculinist culture of a globalizing China. Because many rural parents have aborted or otherwise disposed of their daughters, in China today there are 118 boys for every 100 girls born. Experts estimate that 10.4 percent of men who should marry between 2005 and 2025 will not be able to in the conventional way, creating a population of men known in Chinese as guang gun, or bare branches, because they have not married and produced offshoots. This paper focuses on the prior question of the conditions of possibility of fatherhood, especially for China’s rural men, and draws on media items, official sources, leader speeches, scientific research, and my own interviews in China, to sketch out the outlines of the emergent field of thought and practice surrounding the growing number of guang gun.

Susan Greenhalgh is a professor of anthropology at Harvard. Her recent work has been to understand Chinese projects of modernity/globality – state efforts to transform China’s “backward masses” into the modern workers and citizens needed to make China a prosperous, globally prominent nation – and their effects on China’s society, culture, politics, and global standing. Her interests in the social dimensions of China’s global rise are reflected in three recent books: Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China (2008), Governing China’s Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopoltics (2005) and Cultivating Global Citizens: Population in the Rise of China (2010). More generally, Prof. Greenhalgh is interested in what transpires along the border between science and politics. Her current projects explore the bioscience and biopolitics of the “obesity epidemic” in the U.S., and the emergence of a new form of thin, fit bio-citizen; and the rise of a new field of scientific governance in China aimed at managing the male-heavy sex ratio that has arisen under the one-child policy.

Light Refreshments will be served. Please RSVP here

Please click on the link below to access a copy of the paper that will be presented briefly at the start of the lecture:

For more information:
http://eastasianstudies.research.yale.edu/Greenhalgh_Fatherhood.pdf