The red qipao: ritualized motherhood performativity in China's educational assemblies

Drawing on Butler's gender performativity, this study examines Chinese mothers who wear red qipaos at gaokao (college entrance examination) motivational assemblies. It proposes ‘ritualized motherhood performativity’ to analyze how collective gendered performances in educational rituals construct the idealized ‘good mother’ while subjecting mothers to gendered violence. Ethnographic fieldwork in three high schools in Western China shows how the red qipao naturalizes motherhood as ‘destiny’ through synchronized bodily displays and material symbols, extending Butler's theory beyond its individualism, discursive emphasis, and parody-based model of resistance. The analysis identifies three mechanisms of gendered violence: feminizing educational responsibility, transferring class anxieties onto mothers, and enforcing symbolic compliance. Although mothers exercise agency through strategies such as ‘performative compliance,’ structural conditions severely constrain their resistance. This study contributes to gender and education scholarship by theorizing collective gender performance and offering new tools for analyzing women's gendered performances in educational contexts.