Chinese History: A Useful Category of Gender Analysis

Abstract

FOR CHINA SCHOLARS, JOAN SCOTTrr's WORK has been less a roadmap than a working guide on how to bushwhack and read partially obscured tracks. The specific ways in which Scott's insights might be applied depend on the terrain, as well as the eye of the explorer. Gender as scholarly practice, no less than as category, requires historical analysis. In recent China scholarship, gender (the concept) has proven extremely productive of new knowledge in both Englishand Chinese-language writing, but Gender (Scott's specific working guide) has been less influential in Chinese-language scholarship than in the Anglophone world. The scholarly trajectory of gender in Euro-American (primarily U.S.-based) historical scholarship differs from that in the People's Republic of China. These are not hermetically sealed scholarly geographies-cross-talk between these two locales, as well as with scholars in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere, has been important, as was an earlier wave of traveling feminist theories in the early twentieth century.' What follows, however, is not an attempt at comprehensive coverage. Tracing out two distinct but entangled contemporary scholarly formations is complex enough, and perhaps can suggest ways in which others might further expand the conversation.