title: Revolutionary narratives of self-compassion among older women in post-Mao Beijing.
abstract: Drawing upon interviews and participant observation conducted with hundreds of middle-aged and elderly Chinese women in rural and urban neighborhoods in Beijing Municipality between 1993 and 2012, this paper explores the emergence of revolutionary new narratives of self-compassion among older women in reform-era Beijing. Taught before 1949 that they should first and foremost serve their families and after 1949 that they should put their own individual needs aside and serve the party and the masses, many older Chinese women in Beijing - after the seeds of market reform were sown in the late 1970s - slowly began to focus more attention than before on themselves, their past and present experiences, sources of and solutions to past and present distress, and their own personal enjoyment of everyday life. The analysis shows how western theories of both gero-transcendence and individualization as modernization are insufficient to account for the complex cultural formations of self-care that have developed among older women in the first decades of post-Mao China.
authors: a University of Vermont , 515 Williams Hall, 72 University Place, Burlington , Vermont 05405 , USA.
authors: Jeanne L
authors: JL
authors: Shea
mesh_terms: D000884:Anthropology, Cultural; D002681:China; D004645:Empathy; D005260:Female; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D006801:Humans; D033262:Narration; D064906:Qigong; D012922:Social Change / Q000266:history*; D014930:Women / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology
keywords: China; Qigong; aging; alleviation of suffering; care of the self; popular healing practices; reform era; self-compassion; social change; women