Unruly Spaces: Gender, Women's Writing and Indigenous Feminism in China

Abstract

Since the 1995 Beijing Women's Conference contemporary women's writing in China has been a privileged site for the exploration of gender relations and female specificity. After defining a specifically indigenous Chinese feminism, this paper studies four directions in women's writing that impact upon feminist practice: rural women's stories that encourage advocacy for women's rights; new historical fiction that challenges the established representations of women in history; popular novels and blog sites by urban women that sexually subvert traditions; and poststructuralist ‘personalised writing’ that disengages from male-centred discourse and explores women's radical alterity. We argue that these writings give rise to many sites of activism, not only for Chinese women in urban and rural areas, but also for Chinese women's involvement in trans-global feminist networks and cross-cultural exchanges. Chinese feminists today, through the medium of creative writing, articulate a new politics of difference, refracted through English-speaking and European theories, but adapted to local traditions, histories and regional affiliations, directed toward an indigenous, Chinese-style of feminism with expansive possibilities and an array of indeterminate outcomes.