Lace Made in China: Gender, Skill, and Socialist Transformations
presented by Yuanxie Shi
15 December 2024 at 3:30 pm New York time (UTC-5)
An invitation to register for this Zoom webinar will be sent to all current IOLI Members a week before the event.
Who were the Chinese lacemakers who produced for the global market in the second half of the twentieth century? As part of a larger research project, this talk draws on oral histories and fieldwork observations conducted in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong Province. It explores the gendered division of labor within villages, the social and individual trajectories of skill acquisition, technical specialization across the region, and the mechanisms of socialist-era payment and exploitation. By centering the voices and lived experiences of rural lacemakers, the talk bridges global and local contexts, shedding light on the complexities of their labor and contributions to both the socialist economy and the global market.
Yuanxie Shi
Yuanxie Shi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, specializing in the intersections of labor and women's history, political economy, and material culture. Her dissertation, "Mao’s Clever Hands: Export Lacemaking and Socialist Flexibility in Cold War, 1949-1980s," explores an uncharted history of socialist industrialization since 1949 and during the Cold War. Rather than focusing on mechanical manufacturing and factory settings, her research examines mass production through labor-intensive needlework by millions of Chinese women, primarily in rural areas. This project reveals the subaltern status of rural women and bridges an overlooked social category in both the socialist hierarchy of values and the international division of labor. Yuanxie is also concerned with the evolving ecology of handicrafts and women’s work and is committed to analyzing the historical roots of social injustice affecting both women and nature.