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Paper short abstract

This paper focuses on women embroiderers’ embodied craft practices, revealing how gendered labour, skill transmission, and institutional power intersect in rural and sub-urban China, challenging conventional development paradigms and foregrounding everyday, relational aesthetics and agency.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how women’s embodied craft practices constitute a critical yet under-recognised site of agency within contemporary development processes in China. Drawing on in-depth life history interviews with three senior women craft practitioners working within the field of embroidery, the study explores how gendered labour, skill transmission, and institutional recognition are negotiated through everyday craft work amid heritage governance, marketisation, and rural revitalisation agendas. Rather than treating craft as a static cultural tradition or a policy outcome, the paper conceptualises craft as an ongoing, embodied practice through which women engage with power, uncertainty, and socio-economic change. The narratives reveal that agency is enacted not primarily through overt resistance or entrepreneurial autonomy, but through relational labour, affective commitment, and strategic accommodation within existing institutional frameworks. The accounts foreground, respectively, the politics of evaluation and recognition embedded in heritage regimes, the tensions between collective ethics, aesthetic judgement, and livelihood strategies, and the temporalities of craft labour shaped by family responsibilities and intergenerational transmission. Together, these findings challenge dominant development paradigms that privilege formal institutions, productivity metrics, and technocratic expertise. By centring women’s lived experiences and embodied knowledge, the paper argues for a reimagining of development that recognises everyday labour as a key site where power is negotiated and futures are made. Empirically and conceptually, the study contributes to feminist and decolonial debates in development studies by foregrounding craft practice as both material labour and epistemic practice.