Zhiying Ma

ZHIYING MA, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2019 to aid research and writing on “Intimate Institutions: Psychiatry, Family, and the Rise of Biopolitical Paternalism in Contemporary China.” The fellowship helped the awardee complete a book manuscript of the same title, which examines families’ involvement in the care and management of persons diagnosed with serious mental illnesses in China, especially during the recent mental health legal reform. It maps the workings of “biopolitical paternalism,” a mode of governance that constructs mentally ill patients as subjects of perpetual risk management, that legitimizes the state’s population management as paternalistic intervention, and that displaces the paternalistic responsibilities onto families. This biopolitical paternalism produces harm and ethical unease within families and aggravates health disparities across the mentally ill population. Yet it also creates new political potentials for caregivers. This analysis sheds light on families’ complex involvement in state power and social transformations, on how the biopolitics of population governance interplay with intimate ethics of care, on paternalism as a mode of governance prevalent in the contemporary world, and on the entanglements of institutional arrangements and intimate relations in producing chronic shortfalls of healthcare provisions. The fellowship also enabled the publication of a peer-reviewed article on caregivers’ mobilization in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.