Description
Book SynopsisA history of ideas about women in twentieth-century China. It tracks the categories that Chinese intellectuals have developed to think about women and connects these paradigms to transnational debates about eugenics, gender, and sexuality. It demonstrates that feminism has been integral to thinking about the nation and development in China.
Trade Review“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 SocialismTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
