Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society

Edited by Tonglin Lu

Subjects: Asian Studies
Series: SUNY series in Feminist Criticism and Theory
Paperback : 9780791413722, 204 pages, May 1993
Hardcover : 9780791413715, 204 pages, June 1993

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Against the Lures of Disapora: Minority Discourse, Chinese Women, and Intellectual Hegemony
Rey Chow

2. Gendering the Origins of Modern Chinese Fiction
Yue Ming-Bao

3. The Language of Desire, Class, and Subjectivity in Lu Ling's Fiction
Liu Kang

4. Liu Heng's Fuxi Fuxi: What about Nuwa?
Marie-Claire Huot

5. Rape as Castration as Spectacle: The Price of Frenzy's Politics of Confusion
Elissa Rashkin

6. A Brave New World? On the Construction of "Masculinity" and "Femininity" in The Red Sorghum Family
Zhu Ling

7. Femininity as Imprisonment: Subjectivity, Agency, and Criminality in Ai Bei's Fiction
Margaret H. Decker

8. Sisterhood?: Representation of Women's Relationahips in Two Contemporary Chinese Texts
Zhong Xueping

9. Can Xue: What Is So Paranoid in Her Writings?
Tonglin Lu

Description

"Only women and inferior men are difficult to deal with." — Confucius

Two thousand years after Confucius, the contributors to this book ask if Chinese women have succeeded in changing their status as the equivalent of "inferior men." Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society approaches the role of women in social change through analyzing literature and culture during the May Fourth and the Post-Cultural Revolution periods.

Tonglin Lu is Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.

Reviews

"I believe this to be a path-breaking book in its overall contribution. The scholarship is sound, the presentations (intepretations) are interesting, and the book raises questions of import for both the specialist and the general reader. Aside from an earlier book by one of the contributors (Rey Chow), I can think of no other book in the field of modern Chinese studies that offers with the sharpness that this book does feminist perspectives on modern Chinese literature and, going a bit further, on our appreciation of modern China in general." — Arif Dirlik, Duke University