Reinventing Care: Nursing Assistants' Embodied Resistance Working in Public Hospitals in China

Abstract

For my master’s thesis, I studied third-party patient-care nursing assistants – usually middle-aged, undereducated, female migrants – and their managers. I was inspired to study them because when my grandmother was battling the complications of Parkinson’s Disease, we hired a nursing assistant for her. To write an ethnography, I conducted a three-month fieldwork in two surgical wards in two public hospitals in Changsha, Hunan, where I am from. The title of my thesis is Reinventing Care: Nursing Assistants’ Embodied Resistance Working in Public Hospitals in Changsha, Hunan, in which I narrate the ways nursing assistants resist the bodily regulation of the nursing care industry embedded in public medical institutions. As the Chinese society continues to age, families have no choice but to outsource care to nursing assistants. Since the implementation of the state policy "Hospital Non-Accompanied Nursing Care Service Trial Program" in April 2025, the nursing care industry within public medical institutions has been regulating and supervising nursing assistants more intensively than before the policy. I argue in my thesis that, to respond to institutional control, nursing assistants utilize embodied ways of resistance. In Chapters 2 and 3, I ethnographically depicted the different forms of resistance, including disrupting existing social and spatial orders, uttering dissonances, practicing autonomy, crafting alternative strategies, and forging solidarity with other marginal workers, that nursing assistants embody to confront and resist gazes and exploitation while engaging in physically and emotionally demanding care work.