Gender, Discourse, and the Self in Literature

Issues in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong

Kwok-kan Tam, Terry Siu-han Yip

• Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9789629963996

As a Cultural construct, gender is fictional and imagined, yet its ideological and representational effects on the formation of self and identity are quite real. The fiction behind the fictional, which many accepts as truth, is at the core of what is most intriguing about the problem of gender. Critiquing this narrative, Gender, Discourse, and the Self in Literature unravels the strategies that writers and filmmakers adopt in their (de)construction of the gendered self in three Chinese communities: mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Writing from the vantage points of film, literature, and gender studies, contributors make an innovative marriage to Western gender discourse and the construction and representation of self and identity in contemporary China.

Table of contents

• Half title page
• Full title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Feminism and Gender Discourse in Mainland China,Taiwan and Hong Kong
• 1. Women’s Self-Identity and Gender Relations inTwentieth-Century Chinese Fiction
• 2. Gender Construction, Stereotyping andCross-Gender Writing
• 3. Feminist Literary Criticism in China since theMid-1990s*
• 4. Food, Body and Female Subjectivity: Reading between Western and Chinese Perspectives
• 5. Women as Human vs. Women as Women: Female Consciousness in Modern ChineseWomen’s Literature*
• 6. Liberation of Femininity? Women’s Poetry inPost-Mao China
• 7. Gender Construction in the Novels of ZhangKangkang and Liang Xiaosheng
• 8. Feminist Critique: The Patriarchal Discourse of Chinese Male Writers*
• 9. Three Chinese Women Writers and the City inthe 1990s*
• 10. New Modes of Women’s Writing in the Age ofMaterialism*
• 11. Writing Women’s Literary History: Gender Discourse and Women’s Literature in Taiwan
• 12. The Subaltern Woman’s Voice and the(Film-)making of Modern Taiwan
• 13. Desire, Fear and Gender in Dong Qizhang’s NovelDual Body
• 14. Men Aren’t Men: Feminization of the Masculine Subjectin the Works of Some Hong Kong Male Writers
• Contributors
• Index