Abstract
Tze-lan Sang engages Rui Shen in a conversation about Yu Xiuhua’s poetry. Shen—whose voluptuous praise for Yu’s poems went viral on the Chinese Internet in 2015—unpacks Yu’s poetic craft through a close reading. Shen also notes similarities between Yu and the eighteenth-century peasant woman poet He Shuangqing. For both Shen and Sang, Yu is a feminist in praxis who has broken the silence about female desire and defied mainstream, normative definitions of feminine beauty. However, conceptually, Yu has maintained a distance from the term “feminism.” Shen opines that this self-protective distance, as well as certain male critics’ denigration of Yu’s works, reflects the ongoing struggle between patriarchal ideology and women’s writing in China. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, Sang observes, Yu’s poetry has encountered a warm if calmer reception. Shen and Sang conclude that disability has furnished Yu the necessary solitude and mental space to write.
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