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The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism

Tani Barlow author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:25th Mar '04

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism cover

Barlow documents the history of "woman" as a category in twentieth century Chinese history, tracing the question of gender through various phases in the literary career of Ding Ling, a major modern Chinese writer

A history of ideas about women in twentieth-century China. It tracks the categories that Chinese intellectuals have developed to think about women and connects these paradigms to transnational debates about eugenics, gender, and sexuality. It demonstrates that feminism has been integral to thinking about the nation and development in China.The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism is a history of thinking about the subject of women in twentieth-century China. Tani E. Barlow illustrates the theories and conceptual categories that Enlightenment Chinese intellectuals have developed to describe the collectivity of women. Demonstrating how generations of these theorists have engaged with international debates over eugenics, gender, sexuality, and the psyche, Barlow argues that as an Enlightenment project, feminist debate in China is at once Chinese and international. She reads social theory, psychoanalytic thought, literary criticism, ethics, and revolutionary political ideologies to illustrate the range and scope of Chinese feminist theory’s preoccupation with the problem of gender inequality. She reveals how, throughout the cataclysms of colonial modernity, revolutionary modernization, and market socialism, prominent Chinese feminists have gathered up the remainders of the past and formed them into social and ethical arguments, categories, and political positions, ceaselessly reshaping progressive Enlightenment sexual liberation theory.

“Placing feminist thought within a continuum that defines human life in eugenic terms, Tani E. Barlow shows how Chinese feminism is not simply an inheritance of western ideas but is absolutely central to modernity and its emphasis on the sexed human being. The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism will spark controversy and will eventually stand as a model of scholarship for all of us to follow.”—Wendy Larson, author of Women and Writing in Modern China
“Tani E. Barlow breaks original ground. Her book has a theoretical reach and sophistication very rare in the China field, drawing its analytical tools from history, literature, feminist studies, psychoanalysis, and film criticism.”—Gail Hershatter, author of Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai
“The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism is an exciting and provocative journey through Chinese feminism and its theoretical permutations throughout the twentieth century.”—Lisa Rofel, author of Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism

ISBN: 9780822332817

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 866g

496 pages