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Through the lens of modern Chinese literature, Gender Politics in Modern China explores the relationship between gender and modernity, notions of the feminine and masculine, and shifting arguments for gender equality in China. Ranging from interviews with contemporary writers, to historical accounts of gendered writing in Taiwan and semi-colonial China, to close feminist readings of individual authors, these essays confront the degree to which textual stategies construct notions of gender. Among the specific themes discussed are: how femininity is produced in texts by allocating women to domestic space; the extent to which textual production lies at the base of a changing, historically specific code of the feminine; the extent to which women in modern Chinese societies are products of literary canons; the ways in which the historical processes of gendering have operated in Chinese modernity vis à vis modernity in the West; the representation of feminists as avengers and as westernized women; and the meager recognition of feminism as a serious intellectual current and a large body of theory. Originally published as a special issue of Modern Chinese Literature (Spring & Fall 1988), this expanded book represents some of the most compelling new work in post-Mao feminist scholarship and will appeal to all those concerned with understanding a revitalized feminism in the Chinese context. Contributors. Carolyn Brown, Ching-kiu Stephen Chan, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Yu-shih Chen, Rey Chow, Randy Kaplan, Richard King, Wolfgang Kubin, Wendy Larson, Lydia Liu, Seung-Yeun Daisy Ng, Jon Solomon, Meng Yue, Wang Zheng
The past century witnessed dramatic changes in the lives of modern Chinese women and gender politics. Whilst some revolutionary actions to rectify the feudalist patriarchy, such as foot-binding and polygyny were first seen in the late Qing period; the termination of the Qing Dynasty and establishment of Republican China in 1911-1912 initiated truly nation-wide constitutional reform alongside increasing gender egalitarianism. This book traces the radical changes in gender politics in China, and the way in which the lives, roles and status of Chinese women have been transformed over the last one hundred years. In doing so, it highlights three distinctive areas of development for modern Chinese women and gender politics: first, women’s equal rights, freedom, careers, and images about their modernized femininity; second, Chinese women’s overseas experiences and accomplishments; and third, advances in Chinese gender politics of non-heterosexuality and same-sex concerns. This book takes a multi-disciplinary approach, drawing on film, history, literature, and personal experience. As such, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Chinese culture and society, women's studies, gender studies and gender politics.
This is the first exploration of women's campaigns to gain equal rights to political participation in China. The dynamic and successful struggle for suffrage rights waged by Chinese women activists through the first half of the twentieth century challenged fundamental and centuries-old principles of political power. By demanding a public political voice for women, the activists promoted new conceptions of democratic representation for the entire political structure, not simply for women. Their movement created the space in which gendered codes of virtue would be radically transformed for both men and women.
At the dawn of the 1930s a new empowered and liberated image of the female was taking root in popular culture in the West. This 'modern woman' archetype was also penetrating into Eastern cultures, however, challenging the Chinese and Japanese historical norm of the woman as homemaker, servant or geisha. Through a focus on the writings of the Western women who engaged with the Far East, and the Eastern writers and personalities who reacted to this new global gender communication by forming their own separate identities, Katrina Gulliver reveals the complex redefining of the self taking place in a crucial time of political and economic upheaval. Including an analysis of the work of Nobel Prize laureate Pearl S. Buck, The Modern Woman in China and Japan is an important contribution to gender studies and will appeal to historians and scholars of China and East Asia as well as to those studying Asian and American literature.
The past few years have seen a burgeoning effort to rethink questions of women, writing, and gender in modern China. Here 22 works of fiction, drama, autobiography, essays, and poetry, each prefaced by the author's photograph and a short biographical sketch, introduce women whose literary careers coincided with an era of tremendous social, political, and cultural turbulence. 18 illustrations.
In Quantum Anthropologies, the renowned feminist theorist Vicki Kirby contends that some of the most provocative aspects of deconstruction have yet to be explored. Deconstruction’s implications have been curtailed by the assumption that issues of textuality and representation are specific to the domain of culture. Revisiting Derrida’s claim that there is “no outside of text,” Kirby argues that theories of cultural construction developed since the linguistic turn have inadvertently reproduced the very binaries they intended to question, such as those between nature and culture, matter and ideation, and fact and value. Through new readings of Derrida, Husserl, Saussure, Butler, Irigaray, and Merleau-Ponty, Kirby exposes the limitations of theories that regard culture as a second-order system that cannot access—much less be—nature, body, and materiality. She suggests ways of reconceiving language and culture to enable a more materially implicated outcome, one that keeps alive the more counterintuitive and challenging aspects of poststructural criticism. By demonstrating how fields, including cybernetics, biology, forensics, mathematics, and physics, can be conceptualized in deconstructive terms, Kirby fundamentally rethinks deconstruction and its relevance to nature, embodiment, materialism, and science.
Gender and sexuality have been neglected topics in the history of Chinese civilization, despite the fact that there is a massive amount of historical evidence on the subject. China's late imperial government was arguably more concerned about gender and sexuality among its subjects than any other pre-modern state. How did these and other late imperial legacies shape twentieth-century notions of gender and sexuality in modern China? Susan Mann answers this by focusing on state policy, ideas about the physical body and notions of sexuality and difference in China's recent history, from medicine to the theater to the gay bars; from law to art and sports. More broadly, the book shows how changes in attitudes toward sex and gender in China during the twentieth century have cast a new light on the process of becoming modern, while simultaneously challenging the universalizing assumptions of Western modernity.
Rural-urban migration within China has transformed and reshaped rural people’s lives during the past few decades, and has been one of the most visible phenomena of the economic reforms enacted since the late 1970s. Whilst Feminist scholars have addressed rural women’s experience of struggle and empowerment in urban China, in contrast, research on rural men’s experience of migration is a neglected area of study. In response, this book seeks to address the absence of male migrant workers as a gendered category within the current literature on rural-urban migration. Examining Chinese male migrant workers’ identity formation, this book explores their experience of rural-urban migration and their status as an emerging sector of a dislocated urban working class. It seeks to understand issues of gender and class through the rural migrant men’s narratives within the context of China’s modernization, and provides an in-depth analysis of how these men make sense of their new lives in the rapidly modernizing, post-Mao China with its emphasis on progress and development. Further, this book uses the men’s own narratives to challenge the elite assumption that rural men’s low status is a result of their failure to adopt a modern urban identity and lifestyle. Drawing on interviews with 28 male rural migrants, Xiaodong Lin unpacks the gender politics of Chinese men and masculinities, and in turn contributes to a greater understanding of global masculinities in an international context. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars working in the fields of Chinese culture and society, gender studies, migration studies, sociology and social anthropology. Shortlisted for this year's BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.
In 1898, Qing dynasty emperor Guangxu ordered a series of reforms to correct the political, economic, cultural, and educational weaknesses exposed by China's defeat by Japan in the First Sino-Japanese War. The "Hundred Day's Reform" has received a great deal of attention from historians who have focused on the well-known male historical actors, but until now the Qing women reformers have received almost no consideration. In this book, historian Nanxiu Qian reveals the contributions of the active, optimistic, and self-sufficient women reformers of the late Qing Dynasty. Qian examines the late Qing reforms from the perspective of Xue Shaohui, a leading woman writer who openly argued against male reformers' approach that subordinated women's issues to larger national concerns, instead prioritizing women's self-improvement over national empowerment. Drawing upon intellectual and spiritual resources from the freewheeling, xianyuan (worthy ladies) model of the Wei-Jin period of Chinese history (220–420) and the culture of women writers of late imperial China, and open to Western ideas and knowledge, Xue and the reform-minded members of her social and intellectual networks went beyond the inherited Confucian pattern in their quest for an ideal womanhood and an ideal social order. Demanding equal political and educational rights with men, women reformers challenged leading male reformers' purpose of achieving national "wealth and power," intending instead to unite women of all nations in an effort to create a just and harmonious new world.
In early twentieth-century China, age-old traditions of homosocial and homoerotic relationships between women suddenly became an issue of widespread public concern. Discussed formerly in terms of friendship and sisterhood, these relationships came to be associated with feminism, on the one hand, and psychobiological perversion, on the other—a radical shift whose origins have long been unclear. In this first ever book-length study of Chinese lesbians, Tze-lan D. Sang convincingly ties the debate over female same-sex love in China to the emergence of Chinese modernity. As women's participation in social, economic, and political affairs grew, Sang argues, so too did the societal significance of their romantic and sexual relations. Focusing especially on literature by or about women-preferring women, Sang traces the history of female same-sex relations in China from the late imperial period (1600-1911) through the Republican era (1912-1949). She ends by examining the reemergence of public debate on lesbians in China after Mao and in Taiwan after martial law, including the important roles played by globalization and identity politics.