Beyond Overcoming: A Woman Writer’s Articulation of Pain in Socialist China

Feminist inquiries into the status of women in Mao-era China have shed light on the challenges women experienced in their double role as producers and reproducers in the nascent socialist state. Less is known about how women lived up to expectations of (re)productivity while struggling with illness. Drawing on gender studies, literary studies, history, and the history of medicine, this article examines articulations of pain in the diaries that writer Yang Mo (1914-95) kept between 1945 and 1982, and published in 1985, to explore intersections among normative configurations of pain, gender politics, and identity construction in socialist China. Yang’s diaries show that the narrative of pain is fundamentally shaped by cultural and political discourses of “overcoming” physical and ideological shortcomings – discourses that the party-state upheld to transform the Chinese people into physically-fit, ideologically-correct socialist citizens. Within this context, this study focuses on Yang’s embodied experience to reveal both the empowering potential of these discourses and their inherent limits.

The Gender of Knowledge in Forensic Drama of Late Imperial China

In late imperial China practitioners of forensic investigation in legal cases were predominantly male. While crime literature frequently features female characters, the question of how this literature represents the gender dimension of forensic knowledge remains unanswered. This paper aims to answer this question with an examination of a number of late imperial era theatrical works that depict how forensic knowledge differed across the male and female divide. It argues court-case literature increasingly valorized male forensic knowledge and its relevance to the state legal system. At the same time, these theatrical pieces signify female forensic knowledge following two literary traditions, namely, the commendation of exemplary women and the condemnation of “wanton women.” Investigating these theatrical works at the interstices between court-case literature, women’s history, and forensic history, this paper suggests that the representations of forensic knowledge in Chinese drama accord with major developments in the history of women and gender in premodern China.

Chastity, Foreign Theories, and National Heritage Reorganization: Hu Shi (1892-1962) Addresses ‘The Woman Problem’

This article examines Hu Shi’s view of “The Woman Problem” (funü wenti) through his tripartite approach for achieving a Chinese Renaissance as enunciated in his 1919 article “The Significance of the New Tide” (Xinsichao de yiyi). Our reading of the 1919 article reveals that Hu conceived of the twentieth-century Chinese Renaissance as a meticulously planned reform project based on a tripartite approach that involved: (1) researching concrete problems (yanjiu wenti), (2) importing foreign theories (shuru xueli), and (3) reorganizing national heritage (zhengli guogu). The article aims to demonstrate how Hu applied each of these interconnected methods to “The Woman Problem.” Previous scholarship on Hu’s views on women has failed to notice that it was methodologically integrated into his overarching Chinese Renaissance project and simultaneously underpinned by his academic program to reorganize national heritage. This essay also probes the quality of Hu Shi’s ‘feminism’ by expounding how his analysis of “The Woman Problem” was integrated into his overarching program to achieve a Chinese Renaissance.