Source: Sixth Tone (4/2/23)
What’s Love to a Feminist?
The feminist cultural critic Dai Jinhua shares her thoughts on intersectionality, love, and the shrinking space for alternative lifestyles in contemporary China.
By Wu Haiyun
In late February, Quan Xixi, a popular vlogger, posted a video of herself and two other women interviewing the famous Japanese scholar and feminist Chizuko Ueno. The interview starts on a personal note. “Did you stay unmarried because you were hurt by a man?” Quan asks. “Or was it your family’s influence?”
The backlash to the video came swiftly and from all directions: Critics were stunned that, given the opportunity to interview one of the world’s leading feminist theorists, Quan and her friends would ask why she never married. Gender issues are a perennial hot topic on Chinese social media, but even discussions of the most chilling instances of gender-based violence — like the women found chained to walls in rural areas last year, or a young woman who died by suicide after an organized harassment campaign — seem to circle back to the same subjects: marriage, men, and whether either have anything to offer the modern middle-class woman.
This debate has become highly polarized. Quan and her friends, all of whom are married, seemed to see something radical in Ueno’s choice to stay single, perhaps equating her with China’s “No Kids, No Ring” influencers, self-proclaimed feminists who criticize anyone who chooses to get married. At the other end of the spectrum are advocates of “uterine morality,” who believe a woman’s highest calling is to reproduce with successful, attractive men. Even on issues like bride prices — traditional gifts of money to a bride’s family before marriage — Chinese feminists are split between those who see them as a feudal relic and those who believe women should extract what they can from the system while they have the chance.
To Dai Jinhua, a professor at Peking University and one of China’s foremost feminist cultural critics, this split is the natural outcome of abstracting class from discussions of gender. For a time, it seemed like capitalism might overturn feudal norms and liberate women. But 40 years after the start of marketization, that promise feels increasingly hollow. With social mobility on the decline, marriage stands out as a rare opportunity to move up the social ladder. Meanwhile, social media, which is dominated by educated, middle-class users, has crowded out discussions of broader inequalities affecting elderly women, the poor, and the disabled.
Dai has spent decades writing in the fields of film criticism, cultural studies, and feminism, often from an unabashedly, if also unorthodox, leftist perspective. Sometimes referred to as “China’s Susan Sontag,” she is widely recognized as one of contemporary China’s most charismatic scholars. Speaking with Sixth Tone from Beijing, Dai offered her perspective on social media polarization, the continued importance of class, and the necessity of balancing personal choice and structural change. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. . . [Keep reading on the Sixth Tone site]