Instrumentalised Disability: Gendered Pathways to Health Injustice in China's one-child generation

This project investigates a hidden phenomenon – instrumentalised disability – as a biosocial process through which children’s bodies, health statuses and diagnoses were strategically mobilised under a restrictive regime, with lasting health consequences. Empirically grounded in China’s one-child policy, which permitted additional births in cases of disability, it introduces a critical gender lens to reveal how son preference systematically shaped which child’s disability was mobilised as a familial resource. Building on critical disability studies, this project analyses instrumentalised disability as multiple practices emerging from triadic negotiations among families, communities and local bureaucrats. These practices, including induced impairment, neglected treatable conditions, coerced performance and administrative manipulation, are analysed as variations of a process shaped by scarcity, documentation and moral evaluations. The research examines three interrelated domains: (1) family strategies that recalibrated children’s bodily worth amid conflicting patriarchal fertility norms and state regulation; (2) community moral economies that normalised concealment; (3) everyday bureaucratic collusion that enabled disability claims. Using life-course narrative interviews and trauma-informed methods, the project traces the long-impacts of this gendered instrumentalization on health and personhood. Drawing on critical disability studies and bio-legitimacy approaches, it develops a transferable framework for similar forms of stratified health injustice in other resource-constrained policy contexts.