Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism

Description

Through the lens of modern Chinese literature, Gender Politics in Modern China explores the relationship between gender and modernity, notions of the feminine and masculine, and shifting arguments for gender equality in China. Ranging from interviews with contemporary writers, to historical accounts of gendered writing in Taiwan and semi-colonial China, to close feminist readings of individual authors, these essays confront the degree to which textual stategies construct notions of gender. Among the specific themes discussed are: how femininity is produced in texts by allocating women to domestic space; the extent to which textual production lies at the base of a changing, historically specific code of the feminine; the extent to which women in modern Chinese societies are products of literary canons; the ways in which the historical processes of gendering have operated in Chinese modernity vis a vis modernity in the West; the representation of feminists as avengers and as westernized women; and the meager recognition of feminism as a serious intellectual current and a large body of theory. Originally published as a special issue of Modern Chinese Literature (Spring & Fall 1988), this expanded book represents some of the most compelling new work in post-Mao feminist scholarship and will appeal to all those concerned with understanding a revitalized feminism in the Chinese context. Contents Foreword • Howard Goldblatt Introduction • Tani E. Barlow The Language of Despair: Ideological Representations of the “New Woman” by May Fourth Writers • Ching-kiu Stephen Chan Invention and Intervention: The Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature • Lydia H. Liu The End of “Funü Wenxue”: Women’s Literature from 1925 to 1935 • Wendy Larson Woman as Trope: Gender and Power in Lu Xun’s “Soap” • Carolyn T. Brown Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Stories by Ling Shuhua • Rey Chow Images of Subjugation and Defiance: Female Characters in the Early Dramas of Tian Han • Randy Kaplan Female Images and National Myth • Meng Vue Writing with Your Body: Literature as a Wound—Remarks on the Poetry of Shu Ting • Wolfgang Kubin Harmony and Equality: Notes on “Mimosa” and “Ark” • Chen Yu-shih Three Interviews: Wang Anyi, Zhu Lin, Dai Ding • Wang Zheng In the Translator’s Eye: On the Significance of Zhu Lin • Richard King Yuan Qiongqiong and the Rage for Eileen Zhang Among Taiwan’s Feminine Writers • Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang Taking Tiger Mountain: Can Xue’s Resistance and Cultural Critique • Jon Solomon Feminism in the Chinese Context: Li Ang’s The Butcher’s Wife • Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng Political Evaluation and Reevaluation in Contemporary Chinese Fiction • Margaret H. Decker Notes on Contributors Index