Postcolonial, Neocolonial And Transnational Situations Demand Rhetorical Sensitivity

By Author: Mark Gary
Total Articles: 61
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Lumping all women writers together under "feminism," regardless of their writing philosophy, social impact, and readership is what Morrison calls "lump thinking" "a dangerous misconception" wherein "we are so accustomed to that in our laboratories that it seems only natural to confront all human situations, direct all human discourse, in the same way". This is exactly the reason that Post-Mao women writers disavow Western-style feminism. They know with conviction that they write about sex not to sell the female body for public consumption. They write about women's private lives not to satisfy male voyeurs. They write not to chase personal opportunities at the expense of womankind. Shu Ting, acclaimed poet, uses metaphors to warn beauty writers: "Nowadays, the criteria for women's literature function like a net to catch butterflies. Those who want to be caught by Replica Breitling Bentley the net would submissively fold their colorful wings to be marked as samples, which, in consequence, would be overstocked and sold cheaply by vendors".

Fang ...
... Fang's advice to female college students: "WJhen people tell you marrying rich is better than working your way up, don't believe them." Talking to young women writers, Hu Xin advises, When in the open, the heart of a free-spirited young woman is vulnerable because she still lives in the same old world as that her mother has lived. Maybe the young heart needs to be armored with abstinence, which is not chastity developed and reinforced by patriarchy to imprison and yoke women. Crushing chastity defined by patriarchy, women may want to keep the armor, not to abandon it, to gain independence. Lump thinking is also the reason for Breitling Replica Watches other non-Western women writers' disassociation from Western feminism. Nigerian womanist literary critic Chikwenye Ogunyemi and Kenyan writer and feminist activist Wanjira Muthoni have each declared, "I am not a feminist". Most African American womanists believe, "Privileged feminists have largely been unable to speak to, with, and for diverse groups of women because they either do not understand fully the interrelatedness of sex, race, and class oppression or refuse to take this interrelatedness seriously. Feminist analyses of women's lot tend to focus exclusively on gender and do not provide a solid foundation on which to construct feminist theory" (hooks 15). Dong Limin argues, "Chinese feminism differs from its Western counterpart, because the concepts and frames, such as male/female, center/margin, or collectivity/individuality, which constitute Western feminism, are ineffective and misleading, when applied to the understanding of Chinese feminism".

The misreading of Post-Mao women is an exigency from a rhetorical viewpoint, which calls into question established conceptual frameworks, traditional or mainstream feminist. This exigency not only contests the critical categories in dominant masculinity and feminist literary theories, but also calls for a different rhetorical theory to understand and clarify the cultural and social meanings in a literary work, because "postcolonial, neocolonial, and transnational situations demand rhetorical sensitivity".