The Development Of Chinese Feminist Discourse

By Author: Peter King
Total Articles: 73
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In their essays, Chen and Yang both challenge and reject the conservative notions of true womanhood that used submissive ideals to confine Chinese women to the household. Their work envisions the Chinese new woman as a strong, independent, self-respecting, and hardworking member of society who participates actively in the building of the Chinese home, community, and nation. Their writing not only brightened and vitalized the debate on women's issues in the 1920s, but also claimed women's authority and presence in the formation of Chinese feminist discourse. Further, Chen's and Yang's visions of the new woman and Diesel Jeans discursive engagement with niiquanzhuyi have contributed to the making of a Chinese feminist rhetorical tradition, and to feminist conversations in a global context.

Chen's and Yang's arguments about the woman question demonstrate women's agency in the development of Chinese feminist discourse. Their rhetorical choices are key to the construction of a Chinese feminist rhetorical tradition. As shown in my analysis, both Chen and Yang use ...
... the genre of the vernacular essay and redefinition to challenge the sexist assumptions embedded in the existing social discourses, and to create alternative narratives regarding woman, nation, and modernity. Their innovative employment of hybrid literary and linguistic forms born of the rhetorical encounters between China and the West rewrites Chinese women's cultural histories in ways that resist the discourses that denigrated and silenced women, thus providing a critical intervention to the paternalistic narratives. These rhetorical strategies can be found in contemporary Chinese women's writing; in particular, the vernacular essay has become a rhetorical genre that women writers use frequently to explore women's lives and to battle sexist values and beliefs in today's society. For this reason, Chinese women's writing in the early twentieth century calls for more extensive rhetorical study. Investigations of other women writers of this period would help True Religion Jeans us discover how they have conceptualized the Chinese new woman, and what symbolic resources they have used to engage niiquanzhuyi. Doing so may indeed further uncover a Chinese feminist rhetorical tradition.

Chen and Yang offer their readers, past and present, a unique perspective on Chinese feminist rhetoric. Their work illustrates the kinds of rhetorical, linguistic practices, as well as ideological changes, that Chinese women had to engage to forge women's feminist subjectivity. Their definitions of niiquan reveal the complexity and nuances of Chinese women's feminist thought concerning gender, culture, and class. In the face of a Chinese feudalist patriarchal system and new forms of sexist ideologies that surfaced from both Chinese nationalist and Western imperialist discourses, Chen's and Yang's work indicates that Chinese women had to negotiate different social and political discourses to project their visions of women's liberation in the 1920s and 1930s. Chen's emphasis on developing both women's humanity and femininity not only deconstructs and negates the Chinese feudalist view of women, but also provides a feminist theory that interrogates the dualistic thinking in Western feminist analytical categories. Yang's view of liberation as equal rights for women from different socioeconomic backgrounds, and the connection she draws between the women's movement and the anti-imperialist movement, further complicates our understanding of Chinese feminism.