Wenqi Yang

As a dedicated qualitative scholar, my focus is centered on exploring the evident and latent forms of gendered violence experienced by Chinese and Chinese American populations. I have presented my findings in three peer-reviewed articles and presented at numerous conferences. 

I started my scholarly inquiry by studying how the communist government utilized gender to achieve its political and cultural utopia during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). My first book is entitled When Law Says Little: China’s Morality-based Police Mediation in Domestic Violence Incidents. Bringing state, police system, and individual police officers into the limelight, I show how Chinese frontline police officers mediate non-criminal domestic violence incidents given the strained resources and their heterogeneous construction of domestic violence, as well as how their morality-based mediation strategies intersect with cultural and political understandings of family, marriage, and gender. My second book, No More Iced Coke: Invisible Violence In First-Generation Chinese Americans' Postpartum Practice, focuses on the postpartum practices of first-generation Chinese American women in the Bay Area. Through observing the lived experiences of the new mothers, I reveal how the culturally and racially insensitive reproductive and postpartum care system in the US inhibits mothers of color from physically and mentally recovering from pregnancy and childbirth, thus constituting invisible violence. I also pay attention to advancing qualitative research methods, particularly by examining the influence of researchers’ gender in cross-gender ethnography and translation issues in multilingual fieldwork.

My teaching interest includes courses addressing gender and racial inequalities, particularly in legal and medical systems, as well as qualitative research methodologies. I am teaching the Gender-based Violence seminar in Fall 2023. My office hours are 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. every Tuesday (to make an office hour appointment). 

I received my Ph.D. and M.A. in East Asian Studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2022 and 2017, respectively; and B.A. in philosophy from Tsinghua University (Beijing) in 2014.