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"The Reproduction of Inequality examines women's work on their bodies during pregnancy and postpartum; while mothers typically focus on the health benefits of their choices about breastfeeding or prenatal diet and exercise, these practices also display and perpetuate status inequalities from one generation to the next"--

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the management and control of time in contemporary urban China. It traces how competing claims to, and experiences of, time as a limited resource shape the terms of moral engagement among middle‐class women, their families, their employers, and their friends. Drawing upon two distinct periods of fieldwork among middle‐class families in urban China between 2007 and 2017, I show how Chinese subjects balance private, public, and interpersonal claims on time, creating hybrid approaches to time management that I refer to as chrono‐socialism with Chinese characteristics. This balancing act is gendered: women, and especially mothers, are charged with protecting the moral status of their families and their children through effective temporal balancing. Paying attention to moments of discordant expectations, in the form of expressions of impatience, can illuminate the logics of temporal balancing in the domains of work, play, and rest. [time, morality, impatience, socialism with Chinese characteristics, China]

China faced the arrival of COVID-19 armed with new infrastructure, tools, and personnel that it had developed as part of a nationwide overhaul of its public health system in the wake of the 2003 SARS epidemic. The country learned two major lessons from SARS: it needed to increase its scientific professionalism and transparency, and it needed to build upon the successes of its authoritarian disease control capabilities. These two lessons were on full display during China's COVID-19 response. The goals and methods they implied were sometimes in contradiction with each other, however, and ultimately they failed to prevent a catastrophic pandemic.

Modernization efforts and lessons learned in defeating a deadly virus nearly two decades ago left China with systems that could have stopped the pandemic earlier, if politics had stayed out of the way.

Academic quantitative population health scientists (AQPHS) in the US care for populations with an ostensibly apolitical set of quantitative methods. This quantitative care has three interconnected components: AQPHS care about populations, they care for their data sets and models, and they care with these models' outputs. In the process their ideals of objectivity compete with, and enable, a moral ideal of political advocacy. Slipping between knowledge and intervention, the "real" and the imagined, and individuals and populations, AQPHS produce knowledge that they hope will change public narratives about marginalized populations. In doing so they draw on ideal types, converting quantitative findings about populations into speculation about individual behavior. AQPHS' ideal types both precede and tautologically reemerge from their science.

AbstractThis article introduces the study of social stratification and the body in sociology. Two major fields of social inequality, race and sex, are characterized by visible, physical markers (such as skin tone or body shape) that people use to attribute meaning to the bodies of those around them. Class, on the other hand, offers far subtler bodily clues to the casual observer. Drawing on studies of racialized and sexed bodies, this article derives two principles for studying bodies, class, and social stratification more broadly. First, the relationship between bodies and inequality is bidirectional and co‐constitutive: while beliefs about the meanings of bodily difference are used to legitimate social inequality, preexisting inequalities also shape the appearance, health, and capabilities of the body. Second, the mechanism by which bodily difference is used to justify inequality is the ideology of self‐control: claims about the bodies of marginalized groups tend to frame them as reflecting a lack of self‐discipline, thereby "proving" their moral or evolutionary unfitness for power. The article ends by identifying emerging areas of study that promise to advance the study of embodied stratification and by highlighting the continuing centrality of intersectisonal theories of difference and inequality in embodiment research.

Women entered government public health institutions in China in large numbers in the 2000s, thanks to a national professionalization project prioritizing meritocratic recruitment. To their disappointment, one of the consequences of their new professional involvement was that they were expected to drink heavily alongside men at frequent guanxi-building banquets. They responded by redefining heavy alcohol consumption as a morally deficient act that should have no place in government institutions. Their growing numbers and higher levels of educational achievement, ability to draw upon gendered norms to prioritize familial relationships and individual responsibilities, investment in disentangling individual professional development from drinking capabilities and ability to demonstrate the possibility of building networks without mutual intoxication allowed them to push this critique forward in ways that men could not. Their efforts met with limited success. Alcohol's role in building guanxi was diminished, but the women did not manage to eliminate the perceived necessity of banqueting. (China J/GIGA)

The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment introduces the sociological research methods and subjects that are key to the growing field of body and embodiment studies. With an emphasis on empirical evidence and diverse lived experiences, this handbook demonstrates how studying the bodily offers unique insights into a range of social norms, institutions, and practices.

"The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment challenges the view that bodies belong to the category of "nature" and are biological, essential, and pre-social. It argues instead that bodies both shape and get shaped by human societies. As such, the body is an appropriate and necessary area of study for sociologists. The Handbook works to clarify the scope of this topic and display the innovations of research within the field. The volume is divided into three main parts: Bodies and Methodology; Marginalized Bodies; and Embodied Sociology. Sociologists contributing to the first two parts focus on the body and the ways it is given meaning, regulated, and subjected to legal and medical oversight in a variety of social contexts (particularly when the body in question violates norms for how a culture believes bodies "ought" to behave or appear). Sociologists contributing to the last part use the bodily as a lens through which to study social institutions and experiences. These social settings range from personal decisions about medical treatment to programs for teaching police recruits how to use physical force, from social movement tactics to countries' understandings of race and national identity. Many chapters throughout the book offer extended methodological reflections, providing guidance on how to conduct sociological research on the body and, at times, acknowledging the role the authors' own bodies play in developing their knowledge of the research subject"--