Feminism, Women's Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China

Description

Feminism, Women’s Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China focuses on a sensational elopement in the Yangzi Delta in the late 1920s to explore how middle- and lower-class members of society gained access to and appropriated otherwise alien and abstract enlightenment theories and idioms about love, marriage, and family. Via a network of communications that connected people of differing socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, non-elite women were empowered to display their new womanhood and thereby exercise their self-activating agency to mount resistance to China’s patriarchal system. Qiliang He’s text also investigates the proliferation of anti-feminist conservatisms in legal practice, scholarly discourses, media, and popular culture in the early Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). Utilizing a framework of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book traverses various fields such as legal history, women’s history, popular culture/media studies, and literary studies to explore urban discourse and communication in 1920s China. Front Matter ....Pages i-xvi Introduction (Qiliang He)....Pages 1-40 In Search of Women’s Agency in Everyday Life: The Construction of the Huang–Lu Love Affair in the Press (Qiliang He)....Pages 41-82 The Trials of Lu Genrong: The Criminal Law Reform and Women’s Agency in Late 1920s China (Qiliang He)....Pages 83-124 Polysemy: Discussions and Debates on the Huang–Lu Love Affair (Qiliang He)....Pages 125-163 Polyphony: Vernacularized Feminisms and the Urban Network of Communication (Qiliang He)....Pages 165-214 Vernacularization as Global and Local Experiences: The Huang–Lu Affair in Film and Literature (Qiliang He)....Pages 215-258 Conclusion (Qiliang He)....Pages 259-266 Back Matter ....Pages 267-299