Yayuan (Joyce) Zheng | Women in the Middle: Motherhood Voices and Transforming Reproductive Policies in China

 
Women in the Middle: Motherhood Voices and Transforming Reproductive Policies in China is a multimedia installation that explores the contrast and tensions between China’s national-level fertility policies and the imperceptible, intimate responses of different women. In May 2021, The Communist Party of China’s Central Committee issued the universal third-child policy, stating that a couple can have a maximum of three children. Prior to this, the one-child policy enacted in the 1970s radically changed China’s population. The current adjustment has shown the government’s altered attitudes toward births: people should have more children in order to maintain a normal demographic structure. Birth control through legislation is already a well-known Chinese action on a state level, which illustrates the attitude from a national perspective. However, if we take a step back and adjust our perspective on individual women who possess reproductive rights, they are the individuals who are directly influenced by the birthing policies. These women’s opinions and sentiments regarding motherhood in the wake of changing childbirth policies should be heard. This project presents the voices of real, individual women amid the constantly changing and mutually contradictory childbirth policies. Before being counted as a reproductive unit or a mother, women come as the primary identity of themselves.

Women in the Middle is in the shape of a uterus that demonstrates China’s changing fertility policies over the past four decades and documents women’s personal perceptions using audio and visual components. Both the audio and visual factors are embedded within and plastered onto the uterus, a symbol of motherhood and the origin of life. The core audio element consists of interviews with eleven Chinese women, where they use their native language to share their feelings and thoughts. Spectators can listen to these recordings that form a three-dimensional soundscape while observing the skin-like texture of the uterus, which comprises curated graphic collages of the change and impacts of the childbirth policies. How will the fate of the individual, and the fate of the mother, be influenced and determined when the texture of the uterus is shaped by the reproductive policy of the state? The presence of both state-level policies and personal-level opinions aims to give the audience a glimpse of how China’s transforming fertility policies impact the lives of individual women. Ultimately, this installation asks the audience to contemplate the consequences of depriving women of and empowering them with reproductive rights.