Translating Feminisms in China

This volume, which brings together articles by scholars and activists in China, Japan, Canada and the US in multiple disciplines, seeks to illuminate the problems and possibilities involved in translating feminism from the metropolitan ‘West’ to a locale rife with its own ideas about gender, class, body and sexuality.

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• Showcases the centrality of gender in the formation of modern China
  
• Demonstrates the extent to which translated feminisms — whatever they mean — have transformed the terms in which modern Chinese understand their own subjectivities and histories

Introduction: Translating Feminisms in China: WANG Zheng and Dorothy KO.

1. Concepts of Women’s Rights in Modern China: Mizuyo SUDO.

2. Translating the New Woman: Chinese Feminists View the West, 1905-1915: Carol C. CHIN.

3. Womanhood, Motherhood and Biology: The Early Phases of The Ladies’ Journal, 1915-1925: Yung-chen CHIANG.

4. The Nationalist and Feminist Discourses on ‘Jianmei’ (Robust Beauty) during China’s ‘National Crisis’ in the 1930s: Yunxiang GAO.

5. Making a Great Leap Forward? The Politics of Women’s Liberation in Maoist China: Kimberley Ens MANNING.

6. ‘The Silver Flower Contest’: Rural Women in the 1950s and the Gendered Division of Labour: GAO Xiaoxian.

7. Rethinking the ‘Iron Girls’: Gender and Labour during the Chinese Cultural Revolution: JIN Yihong.

8. Who Is a Feminist? Understanding the Ambivalence towards Shanghai Baby, ‘Body Writing’ and Feminism in Post-Women’s Liberation China: Xueping ZHONG

“One of the major strengths of the chapters dealing with the Socialist period lies in the authors’ use of participant observation and extensive interviewing.” (WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW, December 2009)

"The editors have selected contributions from a wide range of positions and disciplines to create a stimulating ‘cacophony’ of voices, analyses and interpretations." (Women and Gender in Chinese Studies Review, 2008)

Dorothy Ko, a native of Hong Kong, is Professor of Chinese History at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of the recent monograph, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (2005).

Wang Zheng is an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Associate Research Scientist of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (1999) and co-editor with Xueping Zhong and Bai Di of Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era (2002).

This volume, which brings together articles by scholars and activists in China, Japan, Canada and the US in multiple disciplines, seeks to illuminate the problems and possibilities involved in translating feminism from the metropolitan ‘West’ to a locale rife with its own ideas about gender, class, the body and sexuality. Furthermore, these articles showcase the centrality of gender in the formation of modern China by demonstrating the extent to which translated feminisms – whatever they mean – have transformed the terms in which modern Chinese understand their own subjectivities and histories. This book is essential reading for students, academics and general readers interested in East Asia, comparative women’s history, feminist texts and the politics of translation.