'Masculine Domination': Desire and Chinese Patriliny

The American Historical Review, 2008

Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1996

Philosophy Compass, 2010

Based on original texts this essay attempts to describe two main conceptual constructions and practices of ideal womanhood in the Chinese tradition: Lienu (exemplary women) as the Confucian social inspirations for women and Kundao (way of female) as the Daoist commitment to bodily and spiritual transformation.

Hypatia: A journal of feminist philosophy, 2024

The oversight of Chinese feminist traditions in transnational feminist discourse is remarkable given China’s historical importance and vast population. Despite historical suppression by Confucianism, Chinese feminisms emerged at the turn of the last century, drawing from Marxist, anarchist, and liberal movements. While scholars increasingly recognize overlooked female thinkers like Ban Zhao, contemporary discussions of China often revolve around reconciling Confucianism and feminism. This tendency underscores the perception of Chinese feminism as a derivative of Western feminism, where modern thinkers reject local culture for transnational movements. This paper contends that Chinese feminists, including Kang Youwei and He-Yin Zhen, remained deeply rooted in their traditions. While Kang incorporated foreign ideas to advocate for feminist goals and modernize society, he predominantly engaged with traditional philosophy to address its sexist elements. Similarly, He-Yin’s anarcho-feminist approach integrated Western influences to engage with traditional Chinese thought rather than rejecting it outright. By examining prevalent gender and selfhood concepts in traditional Chinese thought, this paper elucidates the notion of “correlative sexism,” and argues that women were not primarily regarded as a “second sex” as described by Simone de Beauvoir. The paper then demonstrates how Kang and He-Yin responded to this sexist discourse, offering novel perspectives on women’s liberation and societal reform.

Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 1999

This article identifies and critically examines four recurring concerns or biases in recent writings on Chinese gender and sexuality that are representative of research interests in the field: (1) The tendency to focus on the most miserable and extreme cases of women's suffering in order to produce a more dramatic effect. This inclination is especially evident in, but not confined to, literary analysis where the tendency is to make a moral case as opposed to uncovering an ethnographic insight (2) The exclusive focus on the perspective ofone gender, which results in disregarding the role ofsocial class in the formulation ofgeneralizations about women's lives. (3) A de-emphasis on men's place within the subjective domain, which contributes to overlooking the importance that emotional bonds exert in uniting couples together. (4) The erotic is the manifestation of only one thing, namely, the culture's prevailing sexual ideology, which encourages the viewing of male/female interaction as an exercise in power and dominance, and discourages interpretation ofthe erotic as a sex-linked aesthetic experience that necessitates a different conceptual framework than one anchored in concepts of dominance and inequality. by William Jankowiak'" Over the last twenty years three recurrent themes recur in writings on Chinese gender: the degree of choice or agency available to women; the utility ofthe sex/gender distinction as a means for understanding the origins and manifestations of gender stratification; and more recently, the meaning of sex and sexuality in Chinese society. The themes and their related subthemes have two aims in common: to document women's position in society by focusing on gender inequality as it is manifested within the corporate or public sphere, and to study the intimate domain as a unisexual (i.e., all women) or homosexual arena for developing emotional bonds. These themes taken together represent the analytical focus of most social scientists interested in the origins and meaning of gender and sexuality in Chinese society. In this essay I will discuss some ofthe more recent writings on Chinese gender and sexuality that represent the field's research interests. My intention here is not to provide an inclusive documentation of everything published on Chinese gender. Instead I want to critique only those writings that reflect a prototypical scholarly perspective on the study ofgender and sexuality in modem Chinese society. Women, Morality, and Modernity The use of women as a central metaphor or symbolic code for assessing degrees of social injustice and inequality is a predominant theme in historical and anthropological literature. Gail Hershatter's astute insights into the relationship between society, morality, and sexuality is nicely illustrated in her analysis of the place of prostitution in Shanghai. 1 For Hershatter,

2010

The China Quarterly, 2009

Hypatia Reviews Online, 2017

Choice Reviews Online, 2008

This is an incisive and highly articulate study of mother-daughter relations in contemporary China. Relations between mother and daughter, particularly the married-out daughter, tend to cut across the patrilineal structures of Chinese kinship systems. For this reason, they have been much less studied than traditional patrilineal norms. While the earlier work of Margery Wolf and Ellen Judd offered valuable insights into the impact of patrilocal marriage on women, The Subject of Gender is the first work to specifically treat the affective bonds between mother and daughter over the course of their lives. Relying on the broad methodologies of oral histories, narrative analysis, gender and memory studies, Harriet Evans draws on intensive interviews conducted with