Dear Colleagues,
I’m pleased to announce the publication of my book Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Literature and Culture by Palgrave Macmillan. This book offers an in-depth study on how late Qing and modern Chinese intellectuals used gender as a discursive battlefield to demand power vis-à-vis colonial discourses. Through a combination of cultural analysis and literary analysis, including discussions of modern Chinese writers such as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Zhang Ziping, Guo Moruo, Mu Shiying, Liu Na’ou, Bai Wei, and Ding Ling, my book shows the resilience and malleability of Chinese modernity, in that the feminine was imagined by many modern Chinese intellectuals as an empowered and empowering source that gave birth to viable modern subjectivities, effectively subverting the Western gaze that intended to link China with an essentialized femininity of weakness, passivity, and decadence. As a result, the feminine in modern China worked as a bisexual notion to undo Western gender binary and gender hierarchy, so as to ultimately challenge colonial cultural hierarchy.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Feminine at Large
Ch1. The Empowered Feminine: Gender, Racial and Nationalist Discourses
Ch2. The Anamorphic Feminine: History, Memory, and Woman in Lu Xun’s Writings
Ch3. The Affective Feminine: Mourning Women and the New Nationalist Subject
Ch4. The Cosmopolitan Feminine: The Modern Girl and Her Male Other in the New-Sensationalist Fiction
Ch5. The Revolutionary Feminine: The Transformation of “Women’s Literature”
Conclusion: The Feminine and Early Chinese Feminism
For more information and book blurbs, click here.
Ping Zhu <zpdarr@gmail.com>