Learning in (Re)Production: Spare-time Learning and the Reproduction of Gendered Labor in Socialist China

This article examines spare-time learning (yèyú xuéxí) in socialist China as a form of labor-mediated pedagogical governance that expanded women’s access to education while simultaneously reproducing gendered divisions of labor. Drawing on archival materials from Shaanxi Province, I trace how spare-time learning was organized across urban industrial and rural agricultural settings, showing that it constituted an ambitious effort to democratize intellectual authority by locating knowledge production within collective labor practice. Yet the capacity of spare-time learning to serve as an equalizing institution was unevenly structured across institutional contexts. I introduce the concept of a “gendered mobility loop” to specify the mechanisms through which the gendered division of labor was continually reconstituted within socialist pedagogy. By tracing shifts from early literacy campaigns to increasingly moralized political training, I argue that women’s double burden was not merely a residual legacy of tradition or an effect of incomplete implementation but was continually reconstituted through pedagogical arrangements embedded in production regimes. Reconceptualizing spare-time learning as a site of ideological reproduction embedded in production, this article contributes to feminist scholarship on social reproduction under socialism and to Marxist cultural studies of the education–labor nexus.