The New Woman in Korea and England in the Writings of Hyeseok Na and Sarah Grand’s the Heavenly Twins

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Jina Moon
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 231-268
Author(s):  
Brigid M. Boyle
Keyword(s):  

NAN Nü ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-362
Author(s):  
Joshua A. Hubbard

This case study of Republican China’s most widely read women’s periodical, The Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi), argues that the New Woman remained a highly contested ideal throughout the journal’s publication from 1915 to 1931. Editors and contributors endorsed competing models of modern femininity that shifted over time, shaped by volatile political conditions and social trends. With a focus on sexual morality, this article subjects normative visions of the modern Chinese woman, as depicted in The Ladies’ Journal, to a queer reading. By exploring the tension between widely circulated heteronormative discourses and their inherent slippages that revealed and fostered subversion, this article demonstrates that, rather than advocating for a clearly defined and radically new icon of sexual liberation, The Ladies’ Journal presented a vision of the New Woman that was capricious, contested, and in some ways conservative.



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