The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism

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. Frontmatter Acknowledgments (page vii) Introduction (page 1) 1 History and Catachresis (page 15) 2 Theorizing "Women" (page 37) 3 Foundations of Progressive Chinese Feminism (page 64) 4 Woman and Colonial Modernity in the Early Thought of Ding Ling (page 127) 5 Woman under Maoist Nationalism in the Thought of Ding Ling (page 190) 6 Socialist Modernization and the Market Feminism of Li Xiaojiang (page 253) 7 Dai Jinhua, Globalization, and 1990s Poststructuralist Feminism (page 302) Conclusion (page 355) Appendix to Chapter 1: Historiography and Catachresis (page 365) Notes (page 373) Works Cited (page 443) Index (page 471) Barlow documents the history of "woman" as a category in twentieth century Chinese history, tracing the question of gender through various phases in the literary career of Ding Ling, a major modern Chinese writer