Gender Politics in Modern China

Writing and Feminism

Tani Barlow

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 1994
• Print ISBN: 9780822313892, 9780822313762
• eBook ISBN: 9780822396840
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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 à 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.

Contributors. Carolyn Brown, Ching-kiu Stephen Chan, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Yu-shih Chen, Rey Chow, Randy Kaplan, Richard King, Wolfgang Kubin, Wendy Larson, Lydia Liu, Seung-Yeun Daisy Ng, Jon Solomon, Meng Yue, Wang Zheng

Table of contents

• Contents
• Howard Goldblatt - Foreword
• Tani E. Barlow - Introduction
• Ching-kiu Stephen Chan - The Language of Despair: Ideological Represenations of the "New Woman" by May Fourth Writers
• Lydia H. Liu - Invention and Intervention: The Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature
• Wendy Larson - The End of "Funu Wenxue": Women's Literature from 1925 to 1935
• Carolyn T. Brown - Woman as Trope: Gender and Power in Lu Xun's "Soap"
• Rey Chow - Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Short Stories by Ling Shuhua
• Randy Kaplan - Images of Subjugation and Defiance: Female Characters in the Early Dramas of Tian Han
• Meng Yue - Female Images and National Myth
• Wolfgang Kubin - Writing with Your Body: Literature as a Wound-Remarks on the Poetry of Shu Ting
• Chen Yu-shih - Harmony and Equality: Notes on "Mimosa" and "Ark"
• Wang Zheng - Three Interviews: Wang Anyi, Zhu Lin, Dai Qing
• Richard King - In the Translator's Eye: On the Significance of Zhu Lin
• Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang - Yuan Qiongqiong and the Rage for Eileen Zhang among Taiwan's Feminine Writers
• Jon Solomon - Taking Tiger Mountain: Can Xue's Resistance and Cultural Critique
• Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng - Feminism in the Chinese Context: Li Ang's The Butcher's Wife
• Margaret H. Decker - Political Evaluation and Reevaluation in Contemporary Chinese Fiction
• Contributors
• Index