Talk by Curt Gambetta (Architecture, Cornell University)

Beginning in the late 1940s, scientists, building professionals, and technocrats embraced cement-stabilized mud (also known as “soil-cement”) as an easy-to-use, economical alternative to pukka concrete and fired brick house construction in India. But for those who made use of it, stabilized mud was more than the mere sum of its technical advantages; rather, it was a technology of the self. Echoing debates about the “choice of techniques” in development economics, engineers, scientists, and other critics of state-led development in the 1970s asserted their ability to choose building techniques that they deemed appropriate to rural India rather than accept the industry-centered imperatives of centralized development planning. At the same time, they hedged that labor-intensive technologies such as stabilized mud would induce self-reliance among rural populations by incorporating underemployed individuals into a wage economy while providing them with low-cost building materials for housing. However, though intended for rural builders, stabilized mud gained traction only by the 1980s and 1990s, as upwardly mobile middle-class house builders in cities sought to build a house of their own. The lecture will approach this history through the activities of scientists associated with ASTRA (Application of Science and Technology to Rural Areas), an erstwhile research cell at the Indian Institute of Science founded in 1974. Through oral history and ethnographic observation of stabilized mud training workshops organized by ASTRA alumni in Bengaluru, it will show how liberalization-era institutions and ideologies of self-reliance recast technological choice as constitutive of a risk-bearing subject.

Curt Gambetta is a historian, designer, and Visiting Critic in the School of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University. His approach to architectural history is interdisciplinary, bringing historical research about material worlds into conversation with ethnographic fieldwork about their making, wasting, and reuse. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at Princeton University. Titled Mold House, Mud House, Marble House: a cultural history of substitution in late colonial and postcolonial India, his dissertation concentrates on practices of material substitution in housing and their changing socio-political milieu, ranging from swadeshi to Import Substitution Industrialization and liberalization era ideologies of consumer choice and value addition in global markets. Prior to teaching at Cornell, he was the Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo-SUNY, a teaching fellow at Woodbury University in Los Angeles, and a resident of the Sarai program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi, where he was involved in several initiatives in new media and urban studies. He is a senior editor of Attention audio journal and co-edited a 2012 issue of Seminar about street life and politics in Indian cities.

The final CCCI talk of the semester titled, "The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Socialist China" will be given by Yige Dong (Sociology, University at Buffalo). She is an assistant professor in both the Department of Sociology and the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Based on the speaker’s book-in-progress, this lecture examines how the way of doing care—performing paid and unpaid reproductive labor that maintains our daily life and attends to people who are in need—has changed among Chinese workers during the rise and fall of industrial socialism.

Drawing on archival data, oral histories, and participatory observation in a textile mill town in central China, this research compares three generations of manufacturing workers’ experience of doing care, with a focus on the realm of childcare and domestic labor, and explains why care work had changed from unpaid “women’s work” in the household to a core constituent of labor welfare during socialist industrialization, and then has been removed from welfare provisions in recent decades. Shifting the analytical focus from the sphere of production to that of social reproduction, this study offers a reinterpretation of Chinese socialism and highlights the indispensable role of gender in understanding political economy.

Prof. Dong’s primary research interest lies at the intersection of political economy, social inequality, and social change. Currently, she is working on a book project, The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Industrial China, which examines the changing politics of care in China’s industrial sector in the past century. Prof. Dong has been awarded the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship in China Studies (2021-2022).

Engendering China is the theme of the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative (CCCI) spring '23 lecture series hosted by faculty member, Yue (Mara) Du (History, Cornell), and the series corresponds to the course of the same name that she is teaching (Engendering China: CAPS2932, ASIAN 2291, FGSS 2932, HIST 2932).

In contemporary China, as in many other places of the world, the ideology and social reality of gender relations are highly paradoxical. Women are flattered for their power as consumers and commitment to the family while they are also expected to engage in wage-earning employment. Men, on the other hand, face the constant pressure of being tough and social problems such as skewed gender ratio and costly betrothal gifts as unintended consequences of a gender regime that is supposedly male-oriented. Are these paradoxes a betrayal of the socialist experiment of erasing gender differences? Are they remnants of China’s long imperial tradition? The series and course explore the power dynamics of gender relations in China from ancient times to the present.

Along with the East Asia Program, this lecture series is co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Department of History, ILR School's Global Labor Institute, The Levinson China and Asia Pacific Studies Program, and Cornell's Society for the Humanities.

Matthew Sommer (History, Stanford University)

This talk presents three case studies from the Qing dynasty of people assigned male at birth who lived as women, while carefully concealing their assigned sex from others. One presented themself as a widow and had a successful career as a midwife for thirty years. Two others practiced faith-healing, and enjoyed relationships with male partners whom they served as wives. All three were eventually exposed and prosecuted for the crime of “masquerading in women’s attire.” What were the circumstances of these individuals’ lives, and how did Qing officials interpret their violation of normative gender boundaries?

Sommer is a social and legal historian of China in the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). His research focuses on gender, sexuality, and family, and the main source for his work is original legal case records from local and central archives in China.

Engendering China is the theme of the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative spring '23 lecture series hosted by faculty member, Yue (Mara) Du (History, Cornell), and the series corresponds to the course of the same name that she is teaching (Engendering China: CAPS2932, ASIAN 2291, FGSS 2932, HIST 2932).

In contemporary China, as in many other places of the world, the ideology and social reality of gender relations are highly paradoxical. Women are flattered for their power as consumers and commitment to the family while they are also expected to engage in wage-earning employment. Men, on the other hand, face the constant pressure of being tough and social problems such as skewed gender ratio and costly betrothal gifts as unintended consequences of a gender regime that is supposedly male-oriented. Are these paradoxes a betrayal of the socialist experiment of erasing gender differences? Are they remnants of China’s long imperial tradition? The series and course explore the power dynamics of gender relations in China from ancient times to the present.

Along with the East Asia Program, this lecture series is co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Department of History, ILR School's Global Labor Institute, The Levinson China and Asia Pacific Studies Program, and Cornell's Society for the Humanities.

Ling Ma (History, SUNY, Geneseo) kicks off this semester's Cornell Contemporary China Initiative (CCCI) lecture series with a talk on "Men, Masculinity, and Childbirth in Early Twentieth-Century China."

What roles did ordinary men historically play in events such as childbirth and abortion? How and why did their involvement change over time? And what can the lens of everyday reproduction tell us about the moving fault lines of masculinity? Historians of reproduction have long placed women and the female body at the center of inquiries about pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, and maternal illnesses and death. Such narratives often focus on women’s negotiation with patriarchal demands, collective interests, gender norms, reproductive technologies, and politics. Men did leave their imprints, usually as theorists, reformers, doctors, or policymakers, who commanded institutions of childbirth and maternal care from a privileged and distant position. Rarely did they come to us as gendered everyday agents—for example, as flawed, confused, but caring partners and fathers—who were deeply involved in and impacted by seemingly feminine reproductive events.

This study makes a deliberate intervention by exploring childbirth and labor pains as a “his-tory.” It argues that childbirth served as a key site for defining and differentiating masculinity and male identity in early twentieth-century China. Individual fathers and partners, far from being uniformly absent or aloof, demonstrated varied enthusiasm and attitudes and performed a diversity of responsibilities and roles during times of pregnancy, childbirth, and reproductive loss. Some of them, defying religious and gender taboos against men’s presence during childbirth, personally assisted their partners in labor and handled the afterbirth. Some litigated, mourned, or chronicled reproductive complications and losses that occurred in their lives. Some openly and unabashedly displayed their disinterest and irritation towards fatherhood and the nitty-gritty of reproduction, while others questioned male sexual and gender privileges and considered their ability to empathize and to share reproductive chores an enlightened masculine strength. By highlighting the plurality and vibrancy of gender innovations and masculine performances surrounding childbirth in early twentieth-century China, this presentation hopes to both enrich our understanding of the recent Chinese past and hearten students of contemporary China with a wider range of gender precedents.

Engendering China is the spring '23 CCCI lecture series hosted by faculty member, Yue (Mara) Du (History, Cornell), and the series corresponds to the course of the same name that she is teaching (Engendering China: CAPS2932, ASIAN 2291, FGSS 2932, HIST 2932).

In contemporary China, as in many other places of the world, the ideology and social reality of gender relations are highly paradoxical. Women are flattered for their power as consumers and commitment to the family while they are also expected to engage in wage-earning employment. Men, on the other hand, face the constant pressure of being tough and social problems such as skewed gender ratio and costly betrothal gifts as unintended consequences of a gender regime that is supposedly male-oriented. Are these paradoxes a betrayal of the socialist experiment of erasing gender differences? Are they remnants of China’s long imperial tradition? The series and course explore the power dynamics of gender relations in China from ancient times to the present.

Along with the East Asia Program, this lecture series is co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Department of History, ILR School's Global Labor Institute, The Levinson China and Asia Pacific Studies Program, and Cornell's Society for the Humanities.

This event is primarily in person. If you need to attend virtually, please register in advance.