The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism
Tani Barlow (Author)
9780822332817
Hardback, published 25 March 2004
496 pages, 4 illustrations, 4 tables
24.3 x 16.5 x 3.6 cm, 0.866 kg
“Placing feminist thought within a continuum that defines human life in eugenic terms, Tani E. Barlow shows how Chinese feminism is not simply an inheritance of western ideas but is absolutely central to modernity and its emphasis on the sexed human being. The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism will spark controversy and will eventually stand as a model of scholarship for all of us to follow.”-Wendy Larson, author of Women and Writing in Modern China
“Tani E. Barlow breaks original ground. Her book has a theoretical reach and sophistication very rare in the China field, drawing its analytical tools from history, literature, feminist studies, psychoanalysis, and film criticism.”-Gail Hershatter, author of Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai
“The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism is an exciting and provocative journey through Chinese feminism and its theoretical permutations throughout the twentieth century.”-Lisa Rofel, author of Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism
The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism is a history of thinking about the subject of women in twentieth-century China. Tani E. Barlow illustrates the theories and conceptual categories that Enlightenment Chinese intellectuals have developed to describe the collectivity of women. Demonstrating how generations of these theorists have engaged with international debates over eugenics, gender, sexuality, and the psyche, Barlow argues that as an Enlightenment project, feminist debate in China is at once Chinese and international. She reads social theory, psychoanalytic thought, literary criticism, ethics, and revolutionary political ideologies to illustrate the range and scope of Chinese feminist theory’s preoccupation with the problem of gender inequality. She reveals how, throughout the cataclysms of colonial modernity, revolutionary modernization, and market socialism, prominent Chinese feminists have gathered up the remainders of the past and formed them into social and ethical arguments, categories, and political positions, ceaselessly reshaping progressive Enlightenment sexual liberation theory.
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 History and Catachresis 15
2 Theorizing “
Women”
37
3 Foundations of Progressive Chinese Feminism 64
4 Woman and Colonial Modernity in the Early Thought of Ding Ling 127
5 Women under Maoist Nationalism in the Thought of Ding Ling 190
6 Socialist Modernization and the Market Feminism of Li Xiaojiang 253
7 Dai Jinhua, Globalization, and 1990s Poststructuralist Feminism 302
Conclusion 355
Appendix to Chapter 1: Histtoriography and Catachresis 365
Notes 373
Works Cited 443
Index 471
