Rhetoric In Early Twentieth Century China And Earlier Western Feminism

By Author: jocelyn
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Post-Mao women writers and their viewpoints remain one of the most complex, challenging cases for Western feminist critics. Although not a monolithic and hegemonic group, Post-Mao women writers do share the same lived experience during and after Mao, an experience hardly identical to that of women of other generations, nations, or ethnicities. They have developed a kind of feminist thinking that differs from that of their white, middle-class counterparts. Feminism was translated in the early twentieth century as niiquan zhuyi (female-power/right-ism), and then changed to niixingzhuyi (female gender-ism) in the 1980s. The former term reminds Post-Mao women of the suffrage rhetoric in Replica Cartier early twentieth-century China and earlier Western feminism, which they believe to be incompatible with the reality under Mao, who granted Chinese women equal rights (see next section).

On the other hand, Post-Mao women writers feel, not without limitation, that niiquanzhuyi, or Western feminism, in promoting gender equality, also promotes gender ...
... sameness; they feel this rhetoric is similar to that of Maoist women's liberation, which denies womanhood and female dignity. The term niixingzhuyi emphasizes gender difference; Chinese women writers feel that through an emphasis on femininity, this term downplays women's intellectuality and capability. Thus, they refuse to have their works associated with either term. Western literary critics who use "established" frameworks to read Post-Mao women's writing often conclude by manufacturing misinterpretations. As the misread and misrepresented Other, Post-Mao women writers serve as a case in point to address problems in transnational literary studies. I propose an enlightened feminist rhetorical theory that can both clarify and unravel cultural and political complexities in other women's literature and can strengthen transnational connectivity of Cartier Replica Watches feminist ideas about world women's literature. By characterizing one feminist rhetorical theory as enlightened, I am not implying that other feminist literary theories are necessarily unenlightening. They are indeed enlightening in terms of, for example, transforming our readings of literary history and canons. Rather, my use of enlightened seeks to foreground issues of power in theory building. For a long time, enlightenment has chiefly moved in a one-way direction: the centralized enlightens the marginalized. Rarely is it the other way around. As the boundaries of world literature and readership disappear along with globalization, theoretical enlightenment by the other becomes crucial to reconstructing feminist theory because of its effectiveness in the reading of other women's literature.

In this essay, the enlightened feminist rhetorical theory is inspired by Post-Mao women's rhetoric born of its specific historical and cultural milieu. The proposed theory asks critics to practice responsible, respectful, and reflective research through rhetorical inquiry into the writer's literary creation. Responsible critical studies stem from respect for non-mainstream, non-Western women's philosophy of writing, and end with reflection on the dominant interpretive framework traditionally believed to be superior. The enlightened feminist rhetorical theory embraces and integrates diverse women's writing philosophies into the study of texts, whether by non-white, non-Western women or by white middle-class or privileged women. This conceptual framework aims to move marginalized feminist theories and rhetorics to the center, and applies enlightened thoughts to transform the centrally positioned mainstream interpretive framework.