Hybrid Textual Strategies Borne Of The Cultural Encounters Between China And The West

By Author: Alyry Yesong
Total Articles: 10
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Contemporary cultural critics and historians have drawn a more complex picture of social, political, and cultural factors that gave rise to a Chinese feminist discourse. Works by Lydia H. Liu, Wang Zheng, and Tani Barlow indicate that early twentieth-century Chinese feminist thought was not solely an ideology of Western origin, but a multifaceted gendered discourse developed by Chinese intellectuals within the Chinese context. Hence, the emerging Chinese feminist discourse is the result of a gradual and continued discursive formation, so to speak, influenced by both indigenous feminist thought and imported feminist ideas. In that sense, nuqiianzhuyi indicates not a prearranged telos in a single formula, but situated responses to the specific and unstable social conditions to which Chinese women were subjected in the early twentieth century. To examine the making of a Chinese feminist rhetoric at the turn of the twentieth century, therefore, we must look not only at texts whose feminism has been identified, but also at ED Hardy Boots those whose feminist orientation ...
... has not been recognized. Only by becoming aware of the various textual strategies employed to subvert old and new paternal narratives can we bring to light those shadowed lives and words.

Literary scholar Amy Dooling's recent Women's Literacy Feminism in Twentieth Century China provides invaluable insights into the literary devices and narrative voice that new women fiction writers developed in the 1920s to promote their view of "modern" female life. For Dooling, these women's texts are feminist not because they were written by women, or because they simply replaced the fictional intellectual male observer with a female one, but because they disrupted the May Fourth cultural depictions of women and rewrote the cultural narrative in such a way that it expresses a recognition of women's collective plight in a patriarchal culture. Whereas Dooling fruitfully examines the role of a feminist imaginary in women's fiction, I argue that we must also look at the ways in which women, known or not well known, used different genres and textual strategies to rewrite the cultural narratives and to ED Hardy Hoodies construct women's subjectivities. Specifically, this essay examines how two Chinese women, Chen Hengzhe (1890-1976) and Yang Zhihua (1900-1973), utilized the genre of sanwen (the essay) and the strategy of redefinition to challenge sexist assumptions embedded in the prevailing social discourses in the 1920s.

It investigates how these textual strategies enabled women to inscribe new visions of gender relations at that historical juncture. Hence, my purpose is not so much to put these two women's names into the Chinese rhetorical tradition, as to look at the ways in which Chen's and Yang's use of the essay and redefinition exemplifies a Chinese feminist rhetoric. By participating in the discursive process from which nuquanzhuyi has been enunciated, this rhetoric forges women's subjectivities and redefines women's identity through hybrid textual strategies borne of the cultural encounters between China and the West.