Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China

304 Pages·2005·1.76 MB·English

by  Matthew Kohrman

Bodies of Difference
Hand-crank tricycles mark a gathering of the Beijing Disabled Youths Club at the home of a
former club member, mid-1980s. Anonymous photo.
Bodies of Difference
Experiences of Disability and Institutional
Advocacy in the Making of Modern China
Matthew Kohrman
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2005 by the Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kohrman, Matthew, 1964–.
Bodies of difference : experiences of disability and institutional
advocacy in the making of modern China / Matthew Kohrman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN0-520-22644-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN0-520-22645-3
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. People with disabilities—China. 2. Biopolitics—China.
I. Title.
HV1559.C6K64 2005
362.4'0951—dc22 2004005279
Manufactured in the United States of America
13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed on Ecobook 50 containing a minimum 50% post-consumer
waste, processed chlorine free. The balance contains virgin pulp,
including 25% Forest Stewardship Council CertiWed for no old
growth tree cutting, processed either TCF or ECF. The sheet is
acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO
Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).8
For Asa and Ezra

CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
/ viii
Preface
/ ix
Acknowledgments
/ xv
Introduction / 1
1. A Biomythography in the Making / 31
2. Why Ma Zhun Doesn’t Count / 57
3. Building a CorporealCorporate Body / 83
4. Speeding Up Life in Beijing / 113
5. Troubled Sociality: The Federation-CanjiRelationship
in Wenchang County / 144
6. Dis/ablement and Marriage: Ridiculed Bachelors,
Ambivalent Grooms / 171
Epilogue / 200
Notes
/ 215
Appendix a
/ 245
Appendix b
/ 251
References
/ 255
Index
/ 275
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Deng Pufang as an adolescent watching CCP luminaries / 39
2. Main ofWce of metropolitan Beijing Disabled Persons’
Federation / 93
3. Disability symbolism, a rare sight in the 1990s / 107
4. A snowy day in Beijing / 133
5. Employee of the Xuan Wu District Disabled Persons’ Federation repairs
his mototrike / 135
6. Keeping track of the community / 145
7. Married Wenchang County residents playing majiang / 187
8. On the move / 195
9. “Wheelchair-bound Deng Pufang ...” / 205
viii
PREFACE
In the summer of 1998 I spent a week in Beijing. The highlight of that
warm-weather visit was not the anthropological conference I was attending
at Beijing University, nor the interview that I conducted with an ofWcial from
whom I had long sought an audience. The most meaningful aspect of the
week, for me, was the lunch I had with a dozen people, mostly men, whom
I had befriended in the mid-1990s, when I had conducted the major por-
tion of the research for this book.
One of these friends was Hai Jun.1Hai had picked me up at the Beijing
Drum Tower subway station, and once we had cleared the tangle of bicycles
parked around the tower, we motored for about a mile to our destination,
a Shandong restaurant, weaving through back streets Wlled with sundry vehi-
cles, potholes, and pedestrians. Two years had passed since I had last been
in Hai Jun’s city, or upon his motorcycle, and it seemed to me that the few
pedestrians who bothered to even look up as we drove past were far less
attentive to the sight of us. Have things changed that much in my absence?
I wondered. When I had Wrst visited China in the 1980s, my tall, Euro-
American persona had frequently been the object of signiWcant stares, even
in cosmopolitan centers like Beijing. And when Hai had begun giving me
rides through the capital city in 1994, many people would gawk at the sight
of two men riding on a three-wheeled motorcycle, one of them an obvious
polio survivor and the other an obvious foreigner. It was the odd combina-
tion of our alterity (sociopolitically mediated otherness) and our bodiliness
(sociopolitically mediated body-self) that no doubt had caused many to stop
and stare. But on this day in 1998 it seemed to me that we hardly attracted
attention at all.
Hai parked in front of the restaurant next to a group of similarly de-
signed motorized tricycles and then he quipped over his shoulder, “Looks
ix