Feminism Presents An Equally Difficult Challenge

By Author: Porter Black
Total Articles: 54
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It is poignant to see just barely begun studies of rhetoric within China working simultaneously in two opposing directions: (1) to prove that Chinese rhetoric is logical, argumentative, confrontational all those things Westerners have said it is not; and (2) to repudiate any and all Western-style rhetoric because it is elitist, the product of a pseudo-democratic system of intellectual and economic oppression and repression. Can we have it both ways, both in China and in the United States Can we explore both the truth and the limitations of these concepts, recognize them as already trope concepts, and move on to redefine pedagogical as well as scholarly goals The essays collected here begin to move in Replica Cartier Santos that direction. Logic, after all, is a term with a long and complicated history, and a concept, not a quality eternally existing in some languages and not others, in some rhetoric and not others. Logic is a mere word used to catch a thought, and sometimes, the net comes back empty.

Feminism presents an equally ...
... difficult challenge. Like postcolonial models, feminist theory is largely Western in derivation. Bo Wang's essay illuminates the degree to which Chinese women and men in the early twentieth century adopted Western-style literary and intellectual culture, and regarded it as superior to their own "backward" traditions. We can now see this moment through the lens of both postcolonial and feminist theory. Women writers in China throughout the twentieth century, like their sisters in the West, encountered economic as well as patriarchal barriers. Hui Wu's and Wang's essays allow us to see for the first time the courageous innovations in style, subject matter, and rhetoric developed by Chinese women writers, as well as the varying degrees to Cartier Santos Replica Watches which they repudiated or avoided feminism, Western-style, despite the fact that we see their work and their projects as decidedly feminist in our terms. Like many Eastern European women even today in post-communist countries, Chinese women have associated Western feminism with bourgeois middle-class Western elites, not as a movement for or from within the working class, the peasant class, or any underclass. Therefore, even women who were engaging in what we would consider feminist activism embodied in literary and rhetorical works rarely used the term feminist to define their goals. In the earlier period of the twenties and thirties described by Wang, both women and men sought intellectual and cultural liberation by adopting Western democratic ideals and practices, and by pursuing these goals in a collective endeavor that was not restricted to a single gender.

For very different reasons, in the periods covered by Wu's assessments, during and just after the Mao decades, a doctrinaire pseudo-egalitarianism was imposed on both genders: women were liberated and equal, should work alongside men, and should dress in a uniform fashion. At home, things remained much the same. Women trying to reclaim their femininity and domestic roles in the Post-Mao era often seemed uninterested in feminism or even anti-feminist (Western style), yet they worked tirelessly to improve the cultural and economic status of women. Again, in our terms, their projects are feminist, yet the term is avoided in favor of more indigenous, naturalized, and accepted words and phrases. Perhaps on one level it is simply that Western-style feminism is considered yang. Like the term logic, feminism may be one of those words that do not travel well.
But I'd hate to end on that point, because rhetoric has always been the child of travel, contact zones, cultural encounters, compromises, and conflicts.