Women's Writing Reconsidered: Toward A New Perspective

By Author: Christ Pual
Total Articles: 55
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Scholars who notice the contradictions in male intellectuals' modes of feminist consciousness tend to conclude that paternalistic appropriations of feminism stifled women's voices. Literary scholars' recent recovery of early twentieth-century women's texts in mainland China, however, indicates that a group of women writers and activists used new hybrid genres and other innovative textual strategies to explore various aspects off anii wenti (the woman question) and invoked women's experiences and insights that cannot be found in male writings. In fact, works that were denigrated or neglected as trivial and non-feminist may reveal unexpected feminist orientations and subversive rhetorical strategies. To examine women's texts from a rhetorical perspective serves as one way to reclaim women's voices in Chinese feminist discourse.

First, by reassessing women's texts regarding gender relations and women's issues, I have no intention of denying Chinese male intellectuals' role and enthusiasm in advocating women's liberation at that historical juncture. Neither do I intend to suggest that new forms of paternalistic narrative ...
... were not detrimental to Ed Hardy Clothes the women's cause. Rather, I am looking for traces that would enable us to recognize the complex voices in the formation of a Chinese feminist discourse. I am more concerned with how history can be retold in such a fashion as to reveal another way of listening to those silenced voices.

Second, by focusing on early twentieth-century women's writing, I do not intend to separate it from the writing of women of earlier times in terms of thematic content, style, and genre. As recent research shows, women's writing of the late Qing period expressed a strong desire for women's independence and participation in social and political activities (Bao 108-22). I am aiming at something more than a simplistic approach that treats cultural change as a transcendence of an older period, ideology, or rhetorical form. To read early twentieth-century women's writing as a negotiation between new and old rhetorical practices will help us trace a different path for the discussions about women and Chinese feminist discourse, and reclaim that which many critics and scholars may have overlooked.

Third, a cross-cultural study of early twentieth-century Chinese women's rhetorical work enables us to examine how women used writing to engage nilquanzhuyi, and how women appropriated Western feminist ideas to serve their own political purposes. Such an investigation necessarily raises these questions: How did early twentieth-century Chinese women name the conditions of their existence What constitutes Chinese feminism How is niiquanzhuyi deployed in Chinese women's writing What innovative textual strategies did women use to challenge the sexist assumptions in prevailing social discourses, and to forge a female subject position during that historical period These queries compel us to open up the dualistic analytical categories of Western feminist and gender studies, and to restore those muffled, but no less feminist voices.