Technical Communication Quarterly Jul 2021

Chinese Women’s Reproductive Justice and Social Media

Hua Wang Michigan Technological University

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.

Journal
Technical Communication Quarterly
Published
2021-07-03
DOI
10.1080/10572252.2021.1930178
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Closed
Topics
modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism feminist rhetorics labor and working conditions social media gender and writing body and rhetoric
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Citation Context

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    Archives, AI, and Technical and Professional Communication
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    Mapping Interaction Design in Global Health Interventions: A Comparative Analys…
    IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
  3. Madson (2024)
    Cannabis Risk Communication: A Scoping Review with a Research Agenda
    Technical Communication Quarterly

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