Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism

317 Pages·1993·23.567 MB·English

by  Tani E. Barlow (editor)

Gender Politics in Modern China

Gender Politics in Modern China
Writing and Feminism
Tani E. Barlow, editor
Duke University Press Durham and London 1993
© 1993 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
00
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
appear on the last printed page of this book.
The text of this book originally was published
without the present introduction, index, and
essays by Yue and Liu as volume 4, numbers
1 and 2 of Modern Chinese Literature.
Second printing, 1998
Contents
vii Howard Goldblatt· Foreword
1 Tani E. Barlow . Introduction
13 Ching-kiu Stephen Chan· The Language of
Despair: Ideological Representations of the
"New Woman" by May Fourth Writers
33 Lydia H. Liu . Invention and Intervention: The
Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature
58 Wendy Larson . The End of "Funti Wenxue":
Women's Literature from 1925 to 1935
74 Carolyn T. Brown· Woman as Trope: Gender and
Power in Lu Xun's "Soap"
90 Rey Chow . Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of
Three Short Stories by Ling Shuhua
106 Randy Kaplan . Images of Subjugation and Defi
ance: Female Characters in the Early Dramas of
Tian Han
118 Meng Yue . Female Images and National Myth
137 Wolfgang Kubin . Writing with Your Body:
Literature as a Wound-Remarks on the Poetry of
Shu Ting
151 Chen Yu-shih . Harmony and Equality: Notes on
"Mimosa" and "Ark"
159 Wang Zheng . Three Interviews: Wang Anyi, Zhu
Lin, Dai Qing
vi Contents
209 Richard King, In the Translator's Eye: On the
Significance of Zhu Lin.
215 Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Yuan Qiongqiong
and the Rage for Eileen Zhang among Taiwan's
Feminine Writers.
238 Jon Solomon, Taking Tiger Mountain: Can Xue's
Resistance and Cultural Critique.
266 Sheung-Yuen Daisy Ng, Feminism in the Chinese
Context: Li Ang's The Butcher's Wife.
290 Margaret H. Decker, Political Evaluation and
Reevaluation in Contemporary Chinese Fiction.
304 Contributors
306 Index
Foreword
Howard Goldblatt
A good idea at just the righttime produced excellent results three years
ago, when this collection of articles and essays first appeared in Modem
Chinese Literature. It was the journal's first issue devoted to gender and
feminism, and the first anthology of its kind in Chinese literary studies. It
was immediately adopted for classroom use by many of its readers.
I foresee a similar destiny for this revised and expanded collection, so
ably edited and introduced by Tani Barlow. Rich harvests await anyone
interested in the literary activities and achievements of modem China, and
specialists and students in Chinese feminist and gender studies have already
signaled their appreciation for the project. But I believe, too, that reissuing
the volume is yet another sign that East Asian scholarship is making its mark
in cultural studies in general.
I am pleased that the editorial board of Modem Chinese Literature had
the good sense to listen to Professor Barlow back then, for this is a collection
that will be used and studied by a great many people for a long time to come.

Introduction
by Tani E. Barlow
In a satire on love and literature, the writer Ding Ling confronted her
fictional poet Ouwai Ou with a choice. His bound-footed, oriental-style
lover,little Ajin, is a tubercular prostitute. Wendy, the so-called modern girl
he courts one pale grey Beijing morning, is a profligate hysteric. Which
arouses him more (and via the magic of modernist literary metonymy,
stiffens his flagging creative resolve), the nativized girl or the modernized
girl? Actually, bad-faith relations with female objects are so prominent in
the story that it is easy to overlook the modernist codes "A Woman and a
Man" brings into play.l What codes are these? Ouwai becomes a man by
acting out a stylized heterosexual gender politics that casts him in the role
of the desiring subject drawn to a female object and held there in thrall to
her narcissism. The woman who makes him feel most manly is the one he
desires the most. His manhood, and thus his personhood, in other words is
constructed during the dance of bourgeois sexual play. The term that best
captures Ouwai (an agent who becomes a self by desiring women and
representing reality; see Ching-kiu Stephen Chan's essay in this volume) is
zhuti, which I translate "sovereign subject." Ouwai is Ding Ling's parodic
male, May Fourth intellectual who nominates himself to be the agent of
Chinese modernity. Though he is an unsavory specimen of a man, nonethe
less Ouwai's gender performance and class skills denote him a subject in
relation to Ajin and Wendy.
The story of Ouwai Ou' s erotic dalliances, then, is a parable about the
historical mission of the gendered, class-stratified, male-dominated treaty
port elite. This class shaped its peculiar national political position through
a strategy of appropriating knowledge from the colonial powers. Along
with electricity and moving pictures, for instance, professional elites took
over social Darwinian discourse on elementary sex differences. Scientific
notions, including the dictum that male versus female constitutes the
originary difference in nature, fed into the discourses of sernicolonial
modernity in China, as a constituting element of modernist codes. That is
1 Ding Ling, "A Woman and a Man," trans. TaniBarlow(with Gary Bjorge), inl Myself
am a Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989),82-103.
I thank Gail Hershatter, Jnderpal Grewal, Donald M. Lowe, and two anonymous readers
who commented or contributed to this essay in various ways. Parts of this introduction were
lifted out of a shorter essay that prefaced the earlier, special issue of Modem Chinese
Literature. My thanks to Howard Goldblatt, editor of Modem Chinese Literature, who
encouraged me to take on the enjoyable task of guest-editing the journal's first special issue
on gender, feminism and women's literature.