Bodies Beneath the Law
Bodies beneath the anesthetised law
This is an analysis of The Law’s societal and psychological implications on women through the lens of Ewick and Silbey’s Legal consciousness. I cannot tell you what ‘The Law’/‘The Policy’ means or is. As the reader, I give you the task to solve what ‘The Law’ may be. Our daily lives are oriented around this thing called ‘the law’, a set of rules that helps transform the chaos of our lives into intricate processes. We are only conscious of the law and its relationship to us when violent or powerful means are embedded into its mechanisms. Have you ever felt your heartbeat intensify upon seeing police cars by the side of the road? We compartmentalise that memory tied to those specific emotions, then become concerned about how we behave and the legal position we are confronted with in relation to the regulation’s powers.
There is always an aspect of ‘The Law’ that we feel oppresses us. It isn’t confined to one policy, one rule, or one act. I can’t tell you much else about the scope of this article, so I’ll just leave you with this.
“What is given may be taken away, at any time …
Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s heart beats, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play.” – Maggie O’Farrell.
Women’s resistance through Art:
Women’s resistance against state authority is often misinterpreted as a monolithic narrative rather than a multifaceted network of subjective experiences asserting autonomy. Chinese women who rebel against authority are classified in ‘relational legal consciousness’ as relying on others to bend the law for them. I seek to challenge this narrative of resistance by answering the central question of ‘how introspective analysis of Chinese women’s interactions with the Law unlocks spaces of conscious resistance’. In examining artistic responses towards the Law, I aim to analyse the interconnectedness between women’s exercise of power ‘against the law’, showcasing how women transform guilt into resistance that rehabilitates relationships and reclaims bodily autonomy. Firstly, the article examines how the state manufactures an idealised model of motherhood. It then draws on secondary ethnographic stories of women’s encounters with this ideal to illustrate Althusser’s theory of interpellation, highlighting how the law reinforces feelings of guilt among those who fail to conform to the ‘ideal woman’. Using the framework of ‘against the law’, I challenge misconceptions of resistance by arguing that resistance can be located in the interstices of institutional structures and local spaces. Ultimately, art becomes a site of revolt for Yu Hong and He Chengyao, who both offer unique stories of their subjective maternal identities.
Beneath the Law
The Law was a population policy that imposed severe penalties, subjecting women to institutionalised violence via Article 25 of the Constitution. The problems with the Law were that the officials remained ambiguous on the law’s implementation. In practice, the multi-generational family model was the mechanism that the system of collective responsibility relied upon for the enforcement of population control.
My Methodology
Legal consciousness scholars trace the “threads of law and legality” woven into “the tapestry of ordinary lives and everyday events”, documenting how individuals participate in the social construction of law. It seeks to understand the “hidden transcripts” of people’s lives, the practices obstructed from the public’s view in heteropatriarchal institutions of domination. These hidden transcripts often contain acts of resistance that are “hidden rites of vengeance”, which serve as an outlet for their grief. Rather than finding the “vengeance” located in responses, I seek to locate the forms of personal identity that “reside in the cracks” of multi-generational family enforcement. The article ties together secondary ethnographic literature on women’s responses to manufactured propaganda, thereby interrogating the ‘The Law’s’ effect on women, instilling mass compliance towards their “desired way of life”. In doing so, the model effectively showcases how the law plays an important function in upholding constructions of power.
As an Australian woman of Chinese heritage, the argument adopts a feminist lens, attentive to the lived experiences of Chinese women affected by state population policies. Resistance is not homogeneous; therefore, art/law aims to reframe the powers of law, from one that privileges an illusion of civic duty to a plurality of women’s voices. Art is an expression of one’s sense of selfhood, a valued lens for our inquiry, as it is a medium through which individuals re-negotiate with hegemonic socio-cultural norms, believing in what they hold to be true to reconstruct their sense of justice. By bringing art into Ewick and Silbey’s framework of legal consciousness, this article addresses a gap in existing narratives of women’s experiences under ‘The Law’. Feminist illustrations of motherhood are stories of resistance, or “hidden transcripts” through which women reconfigure identities that challenge the state’s concept of motherhood. To analyse art, this article adopts the ‘critical mode of analysis’, whereby the element of an artwork works to challenge “nominal power”. In this case, analysis of feminist art reveals issues pertinent in society perpetuated by policies that erase women. The “critical effect” method challenges the viewer to transcend mere spectatorship, revealing how the truth is unlocked in the intersection between ‘subject’ and ‘object’.
Silenced Literature
Tracing the literature on legal consciousness and ‘The Law’, the question frequently posed is ‘why are people accustomed to evading the law?’, focusing narrowly on the moral failings of the Law’s implementation. However, it rarely illuminates women’s experiences and the effects of the policy on their identity, or acts of resistance to regain bodily autonomy. Qian Liu builds on Ewick and Silbey’s theory in the case of the Law, theorising that legal collusion arises as a consequence of a lack of moral legitimacy, presenting ‘relational legal consciousness’ as a lens on how relationships have a key role in determining the actions of women in response to the law. Qian’s findings incorporate Hsiao-Tan Wang’s theory of 自己人，（zijiren = “insider of the group”), encapsulating how the consciousness of belonging in community shapes decision-making. Importantly, she draws on experiences in rural Chinese villages during the Law, theorising that the system of zijiren builds ‘trust in those who evade the law’, requiring people in the community ‘to take matters into one’s own hands to help right the wrong that has been done to them’. However, Qian lacks an introspective investigation into the “hidden transcripts” of women’s personal identity, which is important in the study of ‘against the law’ as many women perform acts of resistance silently through internal responses. Thus, I will demonstrate how these hidden transcripts are manifested in art.
Greenhalgh argues the concept of “woman” as often being bound to “nation” and “population” in China. From her standpoint as an Anglo-American demographer, she examines how women were positioned as “reproductive machines” for the nation, demonstrating how population policies diminished the true “concept” of womanhood in order to optimise the state’s exercise of biopower. However, her focus remains largely on the institutional mechanisms underpinning population control rather than on women’s identities.
The internal response of mothers remains underexplored within legal consciousness scholarship, offering an opportunity to examine the relationship between ‘conceptualising guilt’ and law. Emotions are deeply tied to the law, exhibited through the state’s weaponisation of the ideal wife and mother, internalising norms of what virtuous motherhood ought to be. This discrepancy between women’s perception of themselves and the state’s maternal ideals contributes to “the guilt gap” theory. Examining how women negotiate this guilt gap invites a richer understanding of “hidden transcripts”, as a process of psychological response to societal expectations. By incorporating art, I build on Qian’s argument on the fluidity of interpersonal relationships in helping women against the law. Resistance art discovers that when women are ostracised by the community, they must re-invent their own ways of resisting the law.
Why-are-our-bodies/untrusted-by-our-laws?
“Before the law”
In Behind the Silence, a 40-year-old village woman who underwent four abortions responded to the question about legal collusion against The Law, saying, “Why do people want many children? Other people might need ideological education... But I never needed that at all”. The interviewer observed signs of pride in the woman’s movements, as though she presented herself as an enlightened woman performing her civic duty, prioritising the nation’s best interests to obey the policy. Reflecting her sentiment, 94% of respondents agree with the statement that the PRC “must carry out the [Law] strictly”, believing overpopulation to be a serious social problem. These are examples of ‘Before the Law’ legal consciousness: people who believe the law to be a transcendent system of justice and neutrality, respecting the law to better their lives.
Responses obeying the law establish the power of Family Planning’s weaponisation of a morality framework in propaganda to “psychologically unify” collective consciousness. Figure 1 displays a 1986 poster featuring the ideal mother holding her son on her shoulders, inscribed with red is the slogan to “carry out family planning”. This model exercises Foucault’s biopower, an “investment of the [woman’s] body, its valorisation”, disproportionately diminishing women’s bodies into mere reproductive organs of the state by demanding compliance with The Law. Here, the symbolism of The Law constructs moral identities of faithful versus disobedient citizens to reinforce an idealised version of motherhood.
“The truth…I owe my children.”—Chen.
Althusser’s theory of interpellation posits that people become an ideological subject ‘by being hailed as a subject and responding based on free will’. Similarly, when a mother conveys her experience with guilt, she acknowledges its existence, legitimating the narrative of the virtuous mother. Through an intersectional approach analysing migrant-mothers, Li argues that voicing guilt signifies a response to the interpellating call of ‘ideological recognition’, whereby the mother is ‘self-conscious’ that she has ‘obligations to respect’. Guilt arises from the state glorifying “virtuous” motherhood and the stigmatised discourse of ‘left-behind children’. Hence, marginalised migrant-mothers are “hailed into the subject position of deviant motherhood” by the state, suffering emotionally as a result of perceiving themselves relative to the ‘ideal mother’.
‘Against the law’: Body = revolt?
Feminist artists who have experienced The Law’s oppression transform their ‘pain into power’ by creating a social space for dissenting voices. These two resistance stories illustrate their hidden transcripts, adopting ‘Against the law’ legal consciousness, believing that the law serves as an unjust instrument of state power; thus women reclaim their bodily autonomy through creative re-interpretation to resist the law. Although propaganda defines what the quintessential mother ought to be, resistance art revolts against this deep psychological burden by re-inventing women’s bodily autonomy and personalising motherhood. Female subjectivity is illustrated in Figure 2, showcasing Yu Hong’s painting ‘Liu Wa was Born’, inverting the ideological state apparatus by positioning the mother and child’s gaze horizontally facing the viewer. Their gaze subverts the orthodox mode of “being viewed”, turning the viewer’s gaze “back on ourselves” in order to place ourselves in relation to this intimate scene. Motherhood asserts an agentic role as opposed to an “objectified experience”. The People’s Daily situated beside her symbolises the state’s infiltration of the maternal private sphere, conflating her birthing experience as political resistance.
Contrasting Yu’s painting with Figure 1, the choice to transform the ‘victorious’ mother’s glorified posture into a raw depiction of a mother lying down after giving birth challenges the legitimacy of the ‘ideal mother’. Her emotional reality is reflected in the contrast of the yellow background with the realism of photography, challenging the authority of propagandistic truth. By painting a truthful experience, Yu coalesces the private and public, inviting us to explore her personal “dreamlike reflection on motherhood”. Her art is an act of resistance, rewriting maternal identity as subjective, thereby challenging the politics that erases individual identities of motherhood. For Yu, expressing maternal identities as agentic defies the guilt of not fulfilling societal expectations of mothering, showcasing the fight mothers endure in an authoritarian state.
Contrastingly, He Chengyao portrays a different story of resistance by intertwining nudity with maternal imagery to address the complexity in repairing the damaging effects of inter-generational guilt on motherhood. He’s mother struggled with the guilt gap and mental illness after giving birth to He outside of the law, which led to a lifetime of ostracisation. He’s work ‘Mama and me’ (Figure 3) is a response to women who measure themselves against the ideal woman, powerfully contesting the “myth of maternalism” by reconciling with her feelings of shame. The audience transcends spectatorship by witnessing the space between He and her mother disappear as she embraces her, crystallising the “first time they were photographed together”. Similar to Yu, the symbolism of He’s nudity alludes to collective rebirth, challenging the virtuous ‘ideal woman’. Their embrace dissolves the barriers built by past interpellated guilt, confronting the stigma surrounding women who defy conventional family structures. Therefore, his reconciliation with her mother’s trauma transcribes her familial shame into accepting her mother’s past struggle with social exclusion and interpellated guilt.
End of Testimony
Therefore, the body is a powerful site of resistance for reclaiming personal identity from distorted perceptions of motherhood, unlocking ‘hidden transcripts’ of resistance against the law by powerfully destabilising normative power structures. The wounds of guilt located in ‘before the law’ stories originate from the dominant narrative of the ideal mother overshadowing personal identities and thereby depriving women of bodily autonomy. In revolting ‘against the law’, female artists He Chengyao and Yu Hong reclaim ownership of their personal identities differently, either by embracing their inherited trauma or reclaiming motherhood as their own. Not all women who experience psychological lawfare are able to crystallise or even talk about the memories tied to specific emotions of grief. When confronted with The Law’s powers, some women are not allowed to voice their concerns about their submission under the legal framework. For women, pain lives unforgotten and locked beneath the substratum of their identity. When the struggle is birthed in the form of art, hurt translates into resistance as evidenced in Chinese feminist artists raising their voice when confronted by violence in the law, advocating against social-political constraints.
My Journey through the Past.
As Aileen Moreton-Robinson powerfully professes, both feminist and Indigenous theorists collectively understand that the creation of “knowledge is a site of constant struggle against normative dominant patriarchal conceptual frameworks”. My journey with Aileen’s book Talkin’ up to the White Woman focuses on truth-telling as resistance. Indigenous standpoint epistemology perceives resistance as “not reducible to overtly defiant behaviours”, resistance is multifaceted. Inspired by Indigenous resistance against dominant narratives, I knew I wanted to research Chinese women’s resistance ‘against the law’, writing from a Chinese perspective for Chinese women who engage in a ‘constant struggle’ against the ingrained oppressive values that control women’s bodies, identities and emotions.
When interrogating hostile architecture and the discomfort of law in the ‘Violence’ workshop, I thought of how my grandmother underwent forced sterilisation under the Policy. Due to my grandmother’s history with ‘The Law’, I empathise with acts of feminist resistance towards giving a voice to oppressed Chinese women. Being curious about Ewick and Silbey’s ‘legal consciousness’ framework, I sought to research how the law impacted Chinese women’s emotional responses through an art/law comparison.
On my research journey I met SanShan Lin, a #MeToo grassroots activist, who motivated me to uncover the diverse experiences of women under the Policy and how they respond to the glorified motherhood myth. Being on the edge of a diasporic borderland myself, I do not have the ability to speak on behalf of those mothers who have undergone surgery or had to lose a child forcefully under coercive implementation. However, I wanted to use the resources as a student to freely research this policy, in a community with no censorship, to remember the women who have been stained with grief, guilt and shame due to the ‘The Law’. Thus, I contributed an introspective analysis of feminist resistance art.
Analysing art through a feminist lens provides an avenue for truth-telling, expressing what is untranslatable from Chinese and powerfully expressing the emotions that are withheld due to censorship. From the gallery trip, bell hooks' idea that art can “empower, expand and create consciousness” allowed me to use art to show how Chinese women explore it in resisting the law. The experiences that Chinese women endure are not often empowered by legal scholars due to the untranslatability and censorship surrounding ‘The Law’ social discourse. Art may transcend suppression and illuminate the internalised emotional repercussions on the female body or relationships between mothers and daughters. In weaving together the concept of legal consciousness with the stories of He Chengyao and Yu Hong, I became deeply moved by the ways in which Chinese feminists resist authority.
This article may act as a metonym for the fear that shrouds one’s ability to speak out against the Law. Women silently perform acts of resistance through internal responses manifested in art. By choosing to not subject our bodies and minds to the prolonged effects of guilt, we resist the law for our bodily autonomy. Consequently, women subject to ‘The Law’ are able to repair relationships and reclaim motherhood, but more importantly, disentangle themselves from the motherhood myth that effectively pollutes a sense of self. I hope this article will allow readers to better understand the importance of locating “hidden transcripts” of women’s experiences and to realise the multifaceted ways in which women can resist the law.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Articles/Books/Reports
Althusser, Louis, On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (GM Goshgarian Translation 1971) 1.
Ellul, Jacques, Propaganda: The formation of men’s attitudes (Random House of Canada, 1965) 10.
Ewick, Patricia and Susan S. Silbey, ‘Conformity, Contestation, and Resistance: An account of legal consciousness’ (1992) 26 New England Law Review 731.
Ewick, Patricia and Susan S. Silbey,, The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 1998) 130.
Foucault, Michel, The history of sexuality (Pantheon Books, vol. 1, 1978).
Greenhalgh, Susan and Edwin A. Winckler, Governing China’s Population From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (Stanford University Press, 2005) 194.
Guest, Luise, “Gendered Bodies: Feminism in the Work of Li Xinmo, Xiao Lu and Xie Rong,” (2023) 10(2) Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 85.
Hooks, Bell, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (The New Press, 1995) 1.
Huang, Wei, Yinghao Pan, Yi Zhou, ‘The Policy, Marriage Distortion, and Welfare Loss’ (2025) 107(5) The Review of Economics and Statistics 1341-1355.
Jing-Bao, Nie, Behind the Silence, voices on abortion (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005) 155.
Lampert, Matthew, ‘Resisting Ideology: On Butler’s Critique of Althusser’ (2015) 43(2) Diacritics 124.
Li, Meng ‘Only Mother is the best in the world: Maternal guilt, Migrant Motherhood, and Changing Ideologies of Childrearing in China’, (2022) (22)(2) Journal of Family Communication, 87.
Li, Meng, ‘Guilt and Compensation: The Interplay between maternal emotions and parent-child relationships in migrant families’ (2022) 26 Communications Studies Faculty Works 1607.
Li, Yuchen Viveka, ‘Problematising Reproduction: A feminist critique of China’s Population Policy Shift’ (2026) 00 Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 1, 5.
Liu, Qian, ‘Legal Collusion under China’s The Policy’ (2024) 49(4) Law and Social Inquiry 2052-2073.
Liu, Qian, ‘Relational legal consciousness in the Policy Nation’ (2023) 57(2) Law & Society Review 214.
Manderson, Desmond ‘Bodies in the Water: On Reading Images More Sensibly’ (2015) 27(2) Law and Literature 279.
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, Talkin’ Up the White Woman (University of Minnesota Press, 20th Anniversary edition. 2021).
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, Towards an Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint theory: A methodological tool (2013) 28(78), Australian Feminist Studies 331-347.
Murru, Sarah, Abel Polese, Resistances: Between theories and the field (Bloomsbury Academic, illustrated, 2020) 282.
Ottinger, Sarah, ‘Securing Compliance Through Propaganda: Framing Within China’s Policy Propaganda’ (2025) Southern Communication Journal 355, 357 (‘Ottinger’).
Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale University, 1990) xii.
Shuyue, Jing, ‘The image of Motherhood in New China in the light of Gender Archaeological Research—on the meaning of He Chengyao’s Performance Art’ (2023) 4(7) Art and Performance Letters 68.
Söderbäck, Fanny, ‘Motherhood: A site of repression or Liberation? Kristeva and Butler on the Maternal Body’ (2010) 2(1) Studies in the Maternal 15.
Suter, E. A., ‘The Promise of contrapuntal and intersectional methods for advancing critical interpersonal and family communication research’ (2017) 85(1) Communication Monographs 123-139.
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Wang, Hsiao-Tan, Justice, Emotion and Belonging: Legal Consciousness in a Taiwanese Family Conflict (2019) 53(3) Law & Society Review 764-790.
Wei, Qinlin ‘Motherhood as Method: Feminism and Gendered Resistance in the Works of Yu Hong and He Chengyao’ (2025) (4)(4) Art and Society 37.
Zhang, Ming et al., ‘From Policy to Three-Children Initiative: A Feminist Critique of the Population Planning Policies in China,’ (2024) 17(2) Communication, Culture & Critique 103.
B Legislation
Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (1982)
C Websites/Photos
China’s Population Policy, ‘It’s good to have the only one child’ (Propaganda Poster 1980s, Nanjing municipal population control office, Landsberger Collection) < https://chineseposters.net/posters/e37-351>
Hong, Yu, Witness to Growth (Web Page, 2025) <https://www.yuhongyuhong.com/witness-to-growth>.
Kan, Guan, ‘He Chengyao and Chen Qingqing Art Practice as a Method of Healing: Mother and I, 2001 (2005)’ (Web Page, 3 March 2025) <https://www.guankanjournal.art/journalessays/he-chengyao-and-chen-qingqing-art-practice-as-a-method-of-healing>.
Zhou, Yuwei, ‘Carry out family planning, implement the basic national policy’ (Propaganda Poster 1986, Liaoning). <https://chineseposters.net/posters/e13-415>.
