A Practice of Difference: Uncovering Women’s Space with Nüshu, Women’s Script

Abstract

Nushu, translated from Chinese (Mandarin), means women's script. Nushu is believed to be created and practiced by the local women in Shangjiangxu Township, Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, China for some hundred years. A phonetic system of writing derived from the local dialect, nushu writings have a different scheme of syntax and structure from the Chinese. The exclusive use of this matriarchal script among the local women for generations well indicates that though not being able to receiving education, some women had been able to create their own means of communication to express their own desires. In so doing they developed a tradition of storytelling, orally in chants, in embroidery work, and in written form. They have exposed the ideological limitations and transformed their spaces within a culture that allowed them limited access, defining for themselves an identity which was forgotten in History. Nushu has died and is no longer practiced; I visited the region 3 times in the span of 5 years from 1998-2002 and interviewed some 28 women. It is significant to gain experience from the few remaining elderly women who articulated their stories in a different way through a unique set of writing script. Written between fiction and theory, the rhetoric of the individual and collective memories, fragmentary and repetitive, acts to interrupt the linear tradition of history and explore a fluid feminine practice of writing as informed by the women in the nushu region.