The Goals Of Women's Emancipation, Cultural Preservation And Nation Building

By Author: Alyry Yesong
Total Articles: 10
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Chen's and Yang's writings inform and speak to Chinese women of later generations who have resisted the paternalistic practices that deprived women of their femininity in Mao's era, and who have fought and are fighting against the objectification of the female body as well as exploitation from the global corporate economy of today. The "historical linkages," to borrow Lydia Liu's term, between women writers in this analysis and the writing and activism of Chinese women in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries demand that more attention be given to the rhetorical choices these women made, and are making, to negotiate and renegotiate the goals of Diesel Jeans women's emancipation, cultural preservation, and nation building. Such investigations would shed insights into the discursive strategies that women have employed to insert their voices in Chinese feminist discourse.

As Hui Wu points out in this special issue, many Post-Mao and contemporary women writers have resisted the label feminist because it fails to describe their life experience. Some ...
... Post-Mao women have used alternative terms, such as nuxingzhuyt to discuss women's issues of their time; such a discursive move not only illuminates their specific cultural experience, but also raises the consciousness of those who study feminist rhetoric. In a real sense, we can say that by naming their own living conditions and envisioning a Chinese feminism in the past and present, Chinese women have developed a distinctive feminist rhetorical tradition of their own. Chen's and Yang's work also suggests that concepts such as feminism and gender equality should not be viewed as invented or owned by the Western culture. The deployment otniiquanzhuyi in Chen's and Yang's writing shows the discursive agency that Chinese women assumed in their struggle against oppression and domination. As Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol cogently point out, "To assume that a transnational feminist advocating human rights is simply reproducing Western liberalism ignores the ways in Calvin Klein Jeans which she may be strategically appropriating claims of rights and justice". My analysis has shown that rather than mechanically copying Western theory and rhetorical modes, Chen and Yang strategically appropriated Western (liberal) feminism and experimented with hybrid genres and linguistic forms to serve their own social and political purposes.

In fact, their writings not only appropriated and rewrote Western narratives of rights and freedom, but also created alternative feminist narratives that both resisted and confronted the other. In an increasingly interconnected world, Chen's and Yang's rhetorical choices and feminist thought compel us to turn our concern with abstract questions of equality and liberation in feminism(s) to contingencies, struggles, confrontations, and negotiations at each moment of empowerment that women from different cultures have achieved.