The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism

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by Tani E. Barlow

Duke University Press

Due/Published April 2004, 496 pages, paper

ISBN 0822332701

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. Noting the eugenicist roots of much twentieth-century feminist thought, she describes how the emergence of the social sciences in the 1920s, in China and elsewhere, lent the liberation of women a particular urgency by suggesting that the health of nations and races rested in part on the biological mechanisms of natural selection and therefore on women's responsibility to select sexual partners.

Barlow reads social theory, psychoanalytic thought, literary criticism, ethics, and revolutionary political ideologies to illustrate 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. She focuses on major figures in this ongoing project, including the fiction writer Ding Ling, a leading proponent of women's revolutionary liberation for half a century; contemporary literary scholar and feminist powerhouse Li Xiaojiang, a major advocate of women's studies; and the internationally significant film and cultural critic Dai Jinhua. Barlow's study provides an in-depth examination of one of the world's most compelling and significant feminist projects.

Series: Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies

"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 Socialism