Other Caregiving and Other Activism: Foregrounding Women Behind Black Lung Patients

Abstract

This ethnographic study looks at women caregivers in pneumoconiosis (also known as black lung) patients’ families in rural China. Based on archival research and ten months of digital fieldwork, this thesis argues that the family is a crucial space to examine for thoroughly understanding black lung, a disease that has sickened more workers in China than any other disease and encapsulates the ugliness of China’s miraculous economic development. An analysis of China’s social reforms over the past decades reveals the state’s strategy to push sickened workers back to the family unit, and close narratives of two women’s daily lives in caregiving illustrate the complex impact caused by the incurable black lung as well as the creative responses initiated by suffering people in desperate situations.