| Sex and gender redefinitions, central to China's 1990's market reform, created dilemmas for “children” of the Cultural Revolution, now middle-aged female and male urban professionals. Addressing these issues, three new women's organizations, the Women's Research Institute ( Funü Yanjiusuo) and its two project organizations, the Beijing Weekend Social Club (Beijing Zhoumo Julebu) and The Women's Hotline (Funü Rexian), mediated market reform ills and fostered social change in a blended relationship with state planners' efforts to maintain a stable society and enable the nation regain a central global position by revolutionizing its economic structure. A new gender code (defined in Chinese as xingbie: sex difference), specific practices of women's organizations, and accounts of the organizations' varied associates were channels to analyze particular identity and organizational changes.; The organizations constituted core “community sites” for this study conducted over twenty-two months primarily in Beijing from 1991 to 1996. The main body of work was from 1994–1996. Participant observation was my major research tool. Professional activism prior to graduate school provided comparative data to particularize Chinese women's issues, dilemmas and organizations. I interviewed and interacted with hundreds of members, volunteers, staff, founders, callers and associates of the organizations, as well as, women in university woman's studies programs and woman's federations national and local. Urban research with college educated and bilingual professionals required the development of new methods such as “studying across”, dealing with “familiarity shock”, and grappling with a mobile field as participants were engaged in China, in cyberspace, and in America. The study included the UN Fourth World Conference on Women and the NGO Forum (Beijing 1995) where “emancipated women”, some from organizations studied here, and other women's organizations represented the recentering nation on the global stage.; In their daily lives, participants were buffeted by a post-Mao gender ethic that cast women as second to men. They grappled with individual dilemmas about equality, work, love, sex, singleness, relationships, beauty, personal identity, money, buying and marriage that were duplicated by callers to the hotline from across the nation, and mirrored China's key ethical and social problematics flowing from the new means of production/reproduction modernizing the nation. |
