The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism

"The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism" is a history of ideas about women in twentieth-century China. Tani E. Barlow tracks the categories that Chinese intellectuals have developed to think about women and connects these paradigms to transnational debates about eugenics, gender, sexuality, and the psyche. Contending that Chinese feminism has a basis in eugenicist thought, Barlow describes how the emergence of social science perspectives during the 1920s lent the liberation of Chinese women an urgency by suggesting that women should choose their own sexual partners; the health of the nation, it was argued, depended in part on the biological mechanisms of natural selection. Barlow demonstrates that feminism has been integral to thinking about the nation and development in China. At the same time, she shows that Chinese feminism both borrowed from and contributed to emerging feminist formations around the world. Bringing together social theory, psychoanalytic thought, the ethics of mass movements, literary criticism, and revolutionary political ideologies, Barlow reveals how Chinese feminist theory changed in response to the social upheavals of colonial modernity, revolution, modernization, and market socialism. She discusses prominent Chinese feminists, including the fiction writer Ding Ling, who was, for more than fifty years, a leading revolutionary; the early-twentieth-century theorist Gao Xian; the literary scholar Li Xiaojiang, a major proponent of women's studies; and the contemporary film and cultural critic Dai Jinhua. Barlow's exploration of Chinese feminism provides an in-depth examination of one of the most compelling and significant feminist movements in modern history.