Women in the Chinese Enlightenment

Women in the Chinese Enlightenment
Author: Zheng Wang
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2023-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780520922921

Centering on five life stories by Chinese women activists born just after the turn of this century, this first history of Chinese May Fourth feminism disrupts the Chinese Communist Party's master narrative of Chinese women's liberation, reconfigures the history of the Chinese Enlightenment from a gender perspective, and addresses the question of how feminism engendered social change cross-culturally. In this multilayered book, the first-person narratives are complemented by a history of the discursive process and the author's sophisticated intertextual readings. Together, the parts form a fascinating historical portrait of how educated Chinese men and women actively deployed and appropriated ideologies from the West in their pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation. As Wang demonstrates, feminism was embraced by men as instrumental to China's modernity and by women as pointing to a new way of life.

The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism

The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism
Author: Tani Barlow
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 495
Release: 2004-03-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822385392

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.

Finding Women in the State

Finding Women in the State
Author: Wang Zheng
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520292286

Finding Women in the State is a provocative hidden history of socialist state feminists maneuvering behind the scenes at the core of the Chinese Communist Party. These women worked to advance gender and class equality in the early PeopleÕs Republic and fought to transform sexist norms and practices, all while facing fierce opposition from a male-dominated CCP leadership from the Party Central to the local government. Wang Zheng extends this investigation to the cultural realm, showing how feminists within ChinaÕs film industry were working to actively create new cinematic heroines, and how they continued a New Culture anti-patriarchy heritage in socialist film production. This book illuminates not only the different visions of revolutionary transformation but also the dense entanglements among those in the top echelon of the party. Wang discusses the causes for failure of ChinaÕs socialist revolution and raises fundamental questions about male dominance in social movements that aim to pursue social justice and equality. This is the first book engendering the PRC high politics and has important theoretical and methodological implications for scholars and students working in gender studies as well as China studies.

Finding Women in the State

Finding Women in the State
Author: Zheng Wang
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520292294

Feminist contentions in socialist state formation: a case study of the Shanghai Women's Federation -- The political perils in 1957: struggles over "women's liberation"--Creating a socialist feminist cultural front: women of China -- When a Maoist "class" intersected gender -- Chen Bo'er and the feminist paradigm of socialist film -- Fashioning socialist visual culture: Xia Yan and the new culture heritage -- The cultural origins of the Cultural Revolution -- The Iron Girls: gender and class in cultural representations -- Conclusion: socialist state feminism and its legacies in capitalist China

Women in the Chinese Enlightenment

Women in the Chinese Enlightenment
Author: Zheng Wang
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2023-11-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520922921

Centering on five life stories by Chinese women activists born just after the turn of this century, this first history of Chinese May Fourth feminism disrupts the Chinese Communist Party's master narrative of Chinese women's liberation, reconfigures the history of the Chinese Enlightenment from a gender perspective, and addresses the question of how feminism engendered social change cross-culturally. In this multilayered book, the first-person narratives are complemented by a history of the discursive process and the author's sophisticated intertextual readings. Together, the parts form a fascinating historical portrait of how educated Chinese men and women actively deployed and appropriated ideologies from the West in their pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation. As Wang demonstrates, feminism was embraced by men as instrumental to China's modernity and by women as pointing to a new way of life.

Women, Family and the Chinese Socialist State, 1950-2010

Women, Family and the Chinese Socialist State, 1950-2010
Author: Xiaofei Kang
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-11-11
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9004415939

A rare window for the English speaking world to learn how scholars in China understand and interpret central issues pertaining to women and family from the founding of the People’s Republic to the reform era.

The Birth of Chinese Feminism

The Birth of Chinese Feminism
Author: Lydia He Liu
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2013
Genre: Art
ISBN: 023116291X

The book repositions He-Yin Zhen as central to the development of feminism in China, juxtaposing her writing with fresh translations of works by two of her better-known male interlocutors. The editors begin with a detailed portrait of He-Yin Zhen's life and an analysis of her thought in comparative terms. They then present annotated translations of six of her major essays, as well as two foundational tracts by her male contemporaries, Jin Tianhe (1873-1947) and Liang Qichao (1873-1929), to which He-Yin's work responds and with which it engages. Jin Tianhe, a poet and educator, and Liang Qichao, a philosopher and journalist, understood feminism as a paternalistic cause that "enlightened" male intellectuals like themselves should defend. Zhen counters with an alternative conception of feminism that draws upon anarchism and other radical trends in thought.

Feminism, Women's Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China

Feminism, Women's Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China
Author: Qiliang He
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018-06-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 331989692X

Feminism, Women’s Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China focuses on a sensational elopement in the Yangzi Delta in the late 1920s to explore how middle- and lower-class members of society gained access to and appropriated otherwise alien and abstract enlightenment theories and idioms about love, marriage, and family. Via a network of communications that connected people of differing socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, non-elite women were empowered to display their new womanhood and thereby exercise their self-activating agency to mount resistance to China’s patriarchal system. Qiliang He’s text also investigates the proliferation of anti-feminist conservatisms in legal practice, scholarly discourses, media, and popular culture in the early Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). Utilizing a framework of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book traverses various fields such as legal history, women’s history, popular culture/media studies, and literary studies to explore urban discourse and communication in 1920s China.

The Appropriation of Cultural Capital

The Appropriation of Cultural Capital
Author: Milena Doleželová-Velingerová
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2020-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684173647

"For much of the twentieth century, the May Fourth movement of 1919 was seen as the foundational moment of modernity in China. Recent examinations of literary and cultural modernity in China have, however, led to a questioning of this view. By approaching May Fourth from novel perspectives, the authors of the eight studies in this volume seek to contribute to the ongoing critique of the movement. The essays are centered on the intellectual and cultural/historical motivations and practices behind May Fourth discourse and highlight issues such as strategies of discourse formation, scholarly methodologies, rhetorical dispositions, the manipulation of historical sources, and the construction of modernity by means of the reification of China’s literary past."

Tales of Translation

Tales of Translation
Author: Ying Hu
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2000
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780804737746

The figure of the New Woman, soon to become a major signpost of Chinese modernity, was in the process of being formed at the turn of the 20th century. This book shows how the construction of the New Woman was influenced by the fictional and translational representation of a range of Western female icons, including the French Revolutionary figure Madame Roland and Dumas's "Dame aux camelias.""