ABSTRACT
With the frameworks of Burke’s identification theory and material rhetoric, this chapter examines how a new Chinese mother Mao Wan with postpartum depression identified with other depressed mothers on social media by the craft of crocheting and sharing her embodied experiences, and how they worked together to use the crocheted artifacts as material rhetoric in a large-scale art installation to raise the public’s awareness of and destigmatize postpartum depression. I argue that materiality of embodied experience may “speak back” to the dominant narratives of mental health in a community such as China with strong stigmatization of mental disorders. Mao Wan’s feminist online activism not only contributes to the Chinese feminist movement but also echoes Western feminist scholars’ work, especially in the field of rhetoric of health and medicine where breastfeeding women, pregnant teenagers, new mothers, and infertile women employ their embodied experiences as rhetorical interventions to combat dominant social, political, institutional, and cultural discourses.
