Women in China's Long Twentieth Century

Nan Nü, 2018

This bibliography is an update of Women in China from Earliest Times to the Present: A Bibliography of Studies in Western Languages, published in 2009 by Brill. It includes more than 1500 items in multiple disciplines that have been published in Western languages, primarily English, in a wide variety of venues, in journals, monographs and edited and co-edited volumes, but generally not entries in encyclopedias or chapters in textbooks. Included are a few important items from 2008 and earlier that were missed in the previous version. It does not include online websites and databases that are becoming increasingly important resources for scholarship.

The American Historical Review, 2008

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1986

2007

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Journal of the British Association for Chinese Studies, 2018

NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research

This essay traces the evolution of Chinese women and gender studies in academia since the 1970s through a discussion of a number of prominent Western-language book publications that reveal changing scholarly approaches and attitudes toward this subject. It makes evident that within several generations the field has developed from a study favoured by left-leaning academics to a subject fed by multidisciplinary approaches and integral to China scholarship. The review demonstrates how researchers sought sources and means to expose the once-buried literary and artistic achievements of imperial era women while modern history and literary experts as well as anthropologists and other social scientists countered long-standing narratives of women's oppression, and pursued alternative scenarios to show how Chinese men and women have transformed their culture and society. There is also attention given to publications about masculinity, same-sex cultures, and the one-child policy. The review concludes that more contact between Western and Chinese scholars on women and gender studies will enrich and expand the dimensions of this field.

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,

Scholars of Chinese women's history in the West have often ignored the scholarship of their colleagues in China. For much of the twentieth century, Chinese academia was in chaos. With so little good research coming out of China, Western scholars became accustomed to ignoring the works of Chinese academics. Since the 1980s, however, Chinese scholarship has steadily improved, reaching international standards of quality. Chinese scholars remain highly influenced by their rich intellectual legacy. A post-Marxist mindset makes them extremely sensitive to the importance of social class. And the study of imperial philology has taught them the importance of textual criticism and close reading. This article discusses ten representative Chinese books covering different eras of women's history, which exemplify the contributions that Chinese scholars are currently making to the field. Keywords China – women's history – historiography – philology – post-Marxist

2002

This study is concerned with the faithful maiden cult in China that offers perhaps some of the most compelling evidence regarding women's involvement in China's reform. Women's poetic laments provide a rare glimpse of the emotions and understanding about their roles, identities and meanings during the Taiping Rebellion. Taking Yuan Shou's lamenting poem, I examine how the author challenges her gender role by shouldering household responsibilities as a male and responding to the political unrest due to which the outer world is disrupted. Here, women's laments not only challenge the persistence of the ideology of Confucian womanhood, but also illustrate the distinction between women's conception of themselves and social reality. Thus, this study suggests an ongoing and consistent effort to redefine the limits of women's space, which results in the construction of a separate space between the private and public domains. This represents an arena where the public space and the private space overlap. In other words, this is a privately managed space that functions as a public domain. By writing about their immediate experience during chaotic times, women's writing reflects a transformation in their definition of themselves, but one that is often not recognized and is sometimes neglected. This paper redefines our understanding of gender roles in wartime literature and promotes an alternative strategy for reading women's literature.