In 2007, Zhang Xiaomei, a member of the tenth National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), and the “queen” of the Chinese beauty industry, initiated a motion at the National People’s Congress (NPC) to change the Chinese name for March 8 International Laboring Women’s Day or Sangba Guoji Laodong Funüjie (三八国际劳动妇女节), shortened as Funüjie (妇女, Women’s Day).1 She suggested replacing funü (妇女, women), the Chinese term used for women, which has strong associations with the revolutionary and laboring women in the Mao era, with nüren (女人, literally, female person, women), which privileges gender rather than class and political coding of “women.”2 Zhang’s motion reflects widespread contestation since the end of the Mao era over the definition of women as funü, and the rejection of the Maoist version of women’s liberation. Since 2010, a trend among young urban women has been to celebrate March 7 as Nüshengjie (女生节, female students’ or girls’ festival) instead of the March 8, Funüjie, contrasting the young, modern, feminine nüsheng with the revolutionary, old-fashioned, married and older funü.
The repudiation of funüjie exemplifies an attitude shared by many educated post-Mao urban women, and the preferences for nüren or nüsheng reflect a desire for depoliticization and deproletarianization of the Maoist definition of women and for a more positive evaluation and visibility of sexual difference in the definition of “women.” Zhang’s proposal is also part of a market-oriented ideological agenda and gender discourse, one that values relatively affluent, urban, middle- and upper-class men and women and women as consumers (rather than reflecting the full range of roles women play, including being consumers, producers, and beyond). Moreover, the repudiation of funüjie reflects the influence of new ideas of gender and notions of femininity, include the global neoliberal transition undertaken in China since the 1980s.
Despite wide support from other members of the CPPCC, many of them part of the cultural and business elite, Zhang’s proposal was unsuccessful. She proposed it again in 2009, also without success. As the continued celebration of Women’s Day as funüjie, inaugurated early in 1949, suggests, the gender ideology of the Mao era are still influencing Chinese women’s lives today. The struggle over renaming Funüjie raised questions about how the gender legacy of the Mao era shapes present day gender politics and the much broader question regarding socialist women’s liberation in general in a neoliberal post–Cold War and postsocialist world.
Is the funü still an undeniable/inerasable part of who Chinese women are or want to be? For women in China today, is funü the Other within? How do we recognize this Other and assess its political significance? Furthermore, as one of the major feminist interventions in the twentieth century, the reevaluation of women’s liberation in Mao era China and other previously socialist countries may shed light on feminist struggles in the twenty-first century, both in China and abroad.
This book examines what I call the legacy of the gender project of the Mao era (1949–1978) in contemporary China, by examining how gender subjectivities are constructed in and through personal narratives, particularly in relation to the gender ideas of the Mao era and other gender discourses.3 My emphasis on legacy focuses on how the gender project of the Mao era was and is experienced, performed, or contested by particular women. Instead of seeking to “uncover” historical facts, I investigate how the gender ideas of the Mao era are remembered or forgotten in their lives and highlighted or buried in their narratives. Furthermore, the book examines the persistence of the gender legacy of Mao era among multiple and translational gender discourses circulating in contemporary China and in the transnational post–Cold War world and explores, through an examination of gendered narratives practices, and current strategies of gender subversion.
Context: Funü and Nüxing before the Mao Era
Just like the “red legacy” can be tracked back to the funding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and communist bases (Li and Zhang 2016, 2–5), many Maoist gender ideas are built on thoughts and practices prior to 1949, from early writings on gender equality and women’s liberation in the late nineteenth to twentieth centuries to the New Cultural Movement (1915–25), and from policies and practices in the communist base areas of Jiangxi to that of Yan’an. For example, the freedom of divorce was promoted in the Jiangxi and Yan’an bases and in many ways was more radical and prowomen than the 1950 Marriage Law (Stacey 1983). The Marriage Law of 1950 was also drafted by a group of May Fourth feminists within the party, the women’s committee of the Central Committee of the CCP (Z. Wang 1999).
The Maoist construction of gender ideas and its influence is intertwined with the changing conceptualizations of gender in traditional China, in particular, changes throughout the twentieth century. These changes are often carried out through the changing “languages of gender” in Chinese language. For instance, different Chinese words for the category of women have been used in different historical periods, and some terms have undergone processes of resignification and renewed usage before, within, and after the Mao era. Among them, two Chinese categories for women, funü (妇女) and nüxing (女性), as well as the respective gender subjectivities they produce, are central to this book’s discussion.
Tani Barlow points out that before the early twentieth century, funü was used to signify the collectivity of kinswomen in the semiotics of Confucian family doctrine. It was a relational subject produced within differential kin linkages. In this conception, women’s gender identity was constructed primarily as women of the family, centering around their position as daughter, wife, and mother, and gender symbolism (Barlow 1994, 2004).
With the end of the imperial rule in 1911 and the iconoclastic New Cultural Movement, a new category of women, the “new women,” or xin nüxing (new female sex) emerged. The concept of nüxing was initially invoked in the 1920s as a discursive sign and a subject position against the Confucian discourse. Barlow (1994, 2004) suggests that nüxing was the product of a new conceptualization of gender that operated within the framework of the Western-inspired, biologically differentiated male/female binary. This conception changed the foundation of women’s identity from kin categories to sexual physiology and emphasized the opposition of men to women and sexual attraction (Barlow 1994, 2004).
The nüxing idea is also influenced by Western liberal feminism, feminist anarchism, and the white middle-upper-class female subject these discourses seek to represent. The nüxing subject is coded as urban, educated, and young—that is, as women who had some financial resources and were more involved in public and social life outside of the home, as compared to the funü of earlier generations. The nüxing is an important signifier of the modernity of a new bourgeois China as the counterpart of the modern Chinese man (Barlow et al. 2005; Liu, Karl, and Ko 2013).
Funü and the Women’s Liberation Movement in the Mao Era
Parallel to the emerging of nüxing in the early twentieth century is the introduction of Western feminisms and new concepts such as funü jiefang (妇女解放, women’s liberation) and nüquan (女权, women’s rights) (Evans 2003; Sudo 2006). These ideas were taken over by the CCP and incorporated into its socialist revolutionary agenda from the 1920s on (Davin 1976). The CCP’s concept of women’s liberation was largely guided by Mao’s interpretations of the May Fourth movement and was based on a Marxist analysis of women’s oppression (Davin 2010). Women’s liberation is understood as being a part of and can only be achieved through socialist revolution. The Western liberal feminist version of feminism and the nüxing subject it inspired was condemned as bourgeois and individualistic, engaging in a type of “gender politics” deemed to be in conflict with party policy and broader revolutionary goals.4
Rejecting nüxing for its bourgeois orientation, the communist party-state appropriated the term funü and used it to designate a new political construction. The party reconfigured women’s gender roles and resituated funü within both the guojia (国家, the state) (production) and the jiating (家庭, family) (reproduction) (Barlow 2004). In other words, women were transformed from the women of the family/kin to the women of the nation/family and become the mediation between the modern state and the modern Chinese family (Barlow 2004). With this repositioning of women in relation to the state and the family, a state-defined, politically motivated new ideal of women came into being in Chinese history: with a renewed name funü, as a socialist subject.
The Maoist state’s politically inspired redefinition of women as funü was based on the valuing of women as socialist laborers and was represented by the subaltern (referring to the oppressed women, defined primarily by class membership) laboring women, deliberately prioritized those from the proletarian peasant or working classes. The Maoist definition of funü thus constituted a category primarily based not only on gender differentiation but also on class and political position—a new model of revolutionary proletarian womanhood, prioritizing women’s identity as socialist laborers over that of wives and mothers and their subaltern class identity over their gender.
Funü and the Gender Project of the Mao Era
By “gender project of the Mao era,” I refer to a range of discourses, policies, and practices concerning women and gender put in place by the socialist women’s liberation movement of the Mao era, which promoted gender equality, encouraged women’s participation in public life and “the construction of socialist China,” and institutionalized and enforced a range of new gender ideas and practices. The creation of the category of funü was not just a linguistic event but was consolidated through gender-related policies and symbolic representational strategies, such as the first celebration of the International Women’s Day as funüjie, which was announced in December 1949, immediately following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It was an important symbolic event that was institutionalized to propagandize the important role of funü,5 and it was followed a few months later by the establishment of the Fulian (妇联, ACWF, short for Zhonghua Quanguo Funü Lianhehui, 中华全国妇女联合会, All China Women’s Federation) (which originally incorporated the word “Democratic” in its title), which was designated as the political representative of funü. Fulian used to be in charge of all inscriptions of womanhood in official discourse and had the power to determine what constituted a funü (Davin 1976; Barlow 2004; Z. Wang 2006).
Funü as the new model of gendered being was enabled by public policies and projects that link the Marxist-Maoist theory of women’s liberation into practice. Among them, land reform, rural collectivization, marriage law, and literacy classes in the 1950s are the most important institutional changes that significantly affected the lives of many women. These policies reconfigured gender relations in the home and the workplace, as well as women’s relation to the state materially and rhetorically. Although land reform promised women the rights to land, the family economy model and the dominance of patriarchal values prevented most women from realizing any direct benefits of this right. Nonetheless, women’s rights to land enhanced their capacity to struggle against familial oppression (Stacey 1983). The 1950 Marriage Law aimed to initiate a family revolution that would destroy the “feudal” family and construct a “new democratic family” system with freedom of choice and the rights of adults to divorce (Meijer 1971; Davin 1976; Croll 1981; K. A. Johnson 1983; Stacey 1983; Ocko 1991; Hershatter 2007, 2011). It was meant to liberate women from the traditional family, so they can participate in building a new socialist society as independent socialist citizens in China. Stacey (1983) and K. A. Johnson (1983) argue that marriage reform was not the top priority of the communist regime and was carried out tentatively when it was not in conflict with the priorities of land reform and collectivization; and massive resistance limited the actual parameters of social change.6 Nonetheless, the Marriage Law and the possibilities it introduced were worked out in complex articulations with local village practices and produced more long-term effects in marriage practice and women’s perceptions about themselves (Diamant 2000; Hershatter 2011).
Propagating the new model of funü involved redefining femininity and masculinity through reconfiguring and regulating gendered behavior and appearance. The new roles, social positions, and images ascribed to Maoist women disputed conventional perceptions of proper femininity, many aspects of which were now regarded as feudal, petit bourgeois attributes (M. M. Yang 1999). Funü was made present by pervasive images of strong, active women engaged in physical work or traditional male occupations. The slogan “funü neng din ban bian tian” (妇女能顶半边天, women hold up half the sky) resonated with the images of women as model workers (T. M. Chen 2003b), Tie Guniang (铁姑娘, Iron Girls) (Jin, Manning, and Chu 2006), militant fighters, or political activists in official propaganda (Evans 1999). She possessed a redefined “femininity”: a revolutionary proletarian womanhood. Being a woman no longer implied traditional femininities associated with fragility or weakness but revolutionary, proletarian force.
Although the gender line was redrawn or sometimes blurred when it came to the expression of femininity and masculinity, the regulation of women’s sexuality and reproduction largely remained within a compulsory heterosexual framework. Even though the funü’s body was primarily treated as a laboring body rather than one that menstruates, gives birth, feels sexual desire, or seeks pleasure (Barlow 2004, 275), women’s reproductive bodies were at the same time scientifically constructed and closely controlled by eugenics discourse, public hygiene campaigns, and increased population control through family planning (Evans 1997). Premarital chastity and sexual fidelity within marriage were required for both men and women.
The gender project of the Mao era (discussed in more detail later in this introduction) prescribed, institutionalized, and enforced the performance of a range of new gender practices for women at the discursive and material levels through symbolic representations and public policies. For instance, with the implementation of the Marriage Law, concubinage and child marriage largely disappeared and a minimum marriage age was generally observed. Monogamy was regarded as the norm, and young women generally thought that they should have some say in partner choice (Hershatter 2011). “Women’s liberation” became part of a “universally validated and internalized notion of justice” (Lin 2006, 117). Through these practices, the idea of funü went beyond its linguistic significance to the changing collective perceptions of women in society, including women’s own perceptions of themselves.
Gender ideas of the Mao era have also changed over time, depending on the political, international, and economic context, laden with contradictions and ambiguity, and are shaped by institutional, individual, and local contestation and negotiation. For instance, Wang Zheng (2016) demonstrates that the “Maoist gender discourse” is partly constructed through dynamic and multifaceted feminist contestations by what she calls “socialist state feminists.” Evans (2016) illustrates that the interplay of diverse interests and longings in the creation of Cultural Revolution posters leads to the “ambiguities of address” that evokes complex, contradictory memories of horror and pleasure. Hershatter (2011) shows that party-state policies have become localized and personalized, with rural women incorporated into the state as both agents and targets of state reforms in the 1950s.
While the Maoist gender project also involved reconfiguring masculinity, the focus of this book is on the efforts to redefine Chinese women as funü in the Mao era.7 Situating the construction of the Maoist funü in its political context and material conditions, I focus on the Maoist construction of funü, its influence on Chinese women’s self-perceptions, and its legacy in the construction of individual gender subjectivity in the present.
Feminist Evaluation of the Maoist Women’s Liberation Movement
Anglophone research on Chinese women has been influenced by the agenda and self-perception of Western feminisms in the twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s, situated within Cold War politics, some socialist feminists in the West turned to women in socialist China (and to Soviet and Third World women) in their search for a universal solution to women’s oppression, taking China as a test case for theories on women’s liberation.8 Some Western feminist writings on Chinese women adopted a romantic Orientalism or pro-Maoist utopianism, presenting women in socialist China as part of a counterdiscourse to the masculinist heroics of European socialism. China was idealized by some as a “feminine” mirror image to the “masculine” West, as illustrated by Julia Kristeva’s essay “About Chinese Women” (Kristeva 1977), whereas others viewed Chinese women’s liberation as a source of inspiration for white feminists, Asian American women, and other feminists of color.9 From the late 1970s on, even leftist feminists became disillusioned with women’s liberation in Maoist China and charged that rather than being liberated from patriarchy, Chinese women carried a double burden in the new form of the socialistic patriarchy. Feminist analyses in the 1980s (Andors 1983; Johnson 1983; Stacey 1983; Wolf 1985) argued that the Maoist agenda for the liberation of women in China was incomplete or postponed. The party had not been self-reflective and critical toward the patriarchal influences that had shaped the revolutionaries, and the gender equality legislated at the constitutional level had not translated into gender equality in the areas of employment, wages, education, political participation, or family (Croll 1978; Young 1989). Many of the patriarchal beliefs and practices that underlay gender inequality in traditional Chinese society survived in the lived reality of the Mao era (Z. Wang 2016). The Confucian patriarchal regime based on gender hierarchy still operated at different levels of public and private lives, and gendered divisions of labor persisted at work and at home. Chinese women were not liberated from patriarchy but carried a “double burden” (X. Li 1989, 458–60). Marilyn Young called it “socialist androgyny”: Chinese women were expected to behave and work like men, remaining genderless and sexually invisible in public, while reverting to the role of chaste, devoted wife and selfless mother in private (Young 1989, 236), and were continuously subordinated to the communist state.
Anglophone scholars engaged in studying Chinese women became more self-reflective and nuanced in the 1980s, not only because of the demise of foreign admiration for Mao’s ideas but also because intersectionality emerged as a central critical concept, with attention to gender accompanied by consideration of race/ethnicity and class, largely in response to critiques from Third World feminists and women of color. Studies in the 1990s challenged Eurocentric assumptions about the backwardness or victimization of Chinese women (Chow 1991; Ko 1994), and a dialogue began with newly emerging feminist scholars on China who reject the woman-as-victim/woman-as-agent dichotomy (Young 1989; Gilmartin 1994; Teng 1996).
For example, Rofel’s (1999) research on female workers focused on the range of relations between different political cohorts and China’s modernity projects and demonstrates how some women already working outside the home genuinely felt liberated by the gender ideas of the Mao era. Tina Mai Chen (2003a) has demonstrated that although the socialist rhetoric of model women workers limited other alternative female subjectivities, it also enabled some women to exercise a situated agency in envisioning certain gender alternatives. Gao and Ma’s (2006) research on laodongmofan (劳动模范, labor models) shows how the socialist state’s policies for women’s emancipation empowered rural women to challenge gender and class hierarchies, while they were simultaneously constrained by existing gender norms and practices of gender inequality. Jin, Manning, and Chu’s (2006) study of the Iron Girl of the Mao era also shows that compared with urban women, many rural members of the Iron Girl teams experienced a greater sense of empowerment because the campaign provided official sanction for them to challenge gender constraints and oppression in rural life. Some analysts also make a positive evaluation of the impact of the Maoist gender project in many women’s lives, for example, many well-educated young urban women (for example, Chen 2003a; Lin 2006). In Some of Us, Zhong, Di, and Wang (2001, 208) suggest that the Maoist gender project both empowered and subjugated Chinese women. They were empowered by legalized gender equality and equal participation in social production, but were subjugated by the patriarchal and authoritarian CCP. Harriet Evans (2008) shows that many urban women born in the 1950s enjoyed access to a range of intellectual, social, and travel opportunities that offered fulfillment beyond the cultural horizons of their mothers.
The attempts to modify ideas of femininity in the Mao era constitute a central theme in many feminist analyses of that era. The remodeling efforts have been referred to as the “gender-neutral representation” of women (Honig 2002) or the “masculinization of Chinese women” (Meng 1993; Dai 1995; M. M. Yang 1999; S. Cui 2003; J. H. Zhang 2003). These critics argue that the Maoist gender project promoted gender “sameness,” claiming that women should be equal to men, therefore entailing the masculinization of society.
Rather than erasing gender difference, Evans (1997) demonstrates that the Mao era conceptualization of sexual difference nonetheless tied women to their reproductive roles, insisting on a fundamental, biologically grounded gender difference.10 Roberts argues (2004a, 2004b, 2009) that the Maoist gender project reassigns the feminine/masculine binary on a class basis, with the revolutionary masses valued as virile and strong (including fighting women), and more educated or sophisticated “counter-revolutionaries” derided and feminized as useless and nonreproductive.11 The supposed minimization of gender difference according to appearance (e.g., by wearing uniforms) was in fact less rigorous than is often assumed, as there were actually clear-cut differences between women’s and men’s clothes (Finnane 1996, 2008). Wearing plain, faded, and patched clothes with no personal style or adornment signaled a rejection not so much of femininity as of the bourgeois lifestyle and implied identification with the proletariat (T. M. Chen 2003b).
Nüxing and Post-Mao Gender Discourses
Inside China, post-Mao gender discourses convey a radical departure from the Mao era in many ways. Since Mao’s death in 1976, both the party line and popular discourse have represented the Cultural Revolution as 十年动乱 (shinian dongluan, ten years of chaos) that distorted 人的天性 (ren de tianxing, human nature), an idea derived from Wang Ruoshui’s critique of socialist alienation (Kelly 1987). Gender is an important constituent in these discourses about the Cultural Revolution. For example, critics of the Mao era argue that ultra-leftist policies distorted “women’s nature” (nüren de tianxing) and led to the “unnatural” masculinization of Chinese women. Post-Mao Chinese feminists, influenced by new gender discourses that affirm gender difference, have criticized the Maoist definition of “women” and women’s liberation. Li Xiaojiang (1995) and other feminists accused the official Maoist gender project of obliterating sexual difference, denaturalizing women’s bodies, and making Chinese women into nonwomen. In academia and popular culture, there was a surge of interest in gender differentiation and discourses that affirm gender difference and heterosexuality (Woo 1994; Croll 1995). In the early 1980s, while the Fulian (restored in 1978) sought to reassert its claim to represent the nation’s women and reinsert them into post-Mao political ideology, public debate questioned Fulian’s position as representing Chinese women and the party-mandated women’s liberation.12 These debates challenged the state’s exclusive control over Chinese women’s liberation discourses and the definition of “women” and anticipated a new female subject position not represented by the Maoist idea of funü.
While the Cultural Revolution was regarded as a time of general disorder, the Maoist funü is seen as the disorderly woman who is a manifestation of that chaos, threatening not only the political order but also the gender divide. As Roberts’s (2009) research notes, gender discourses in the Cultural Revolution period associated the strong revolutionary (including revolutionary women) with masculinity and conflated the weak feminine (symbolic female) with the counterrevolutionary; the latter was to be subordinated to the former. Revolutionary women’s appropriation of masculine power threatened the male ownership of masculinity and power, and men who had belonged to the counterrevolutionary classes were emasculated and feminized and experienced identity crises.
With the end of the Cultural Revolution, it became imperative for many men to throw off their counterrevolutionary/feminine identity, reassert their masculinity and supremacy, and restore the old gender order, pushing women back into their subordinate roles. This process is reflected in the search for the nanzihan (男子汉, manly man) in the literature of the 1980s (Honig 1988; Zhong 2000). The Maoist funü no longer appeared as a model to emulate but as an unfortunate and dangerous deviant, the monstrous product of the previous era. Her transgressive survival disturbed the post-Mao project of restoring “proper” gender orders, and she was seen to be in need of taming to reestablish clear categories of masculinity and femininity.
Post-Mao discourse on sexual difference sought to reestablish “real women” as more fragile and dependent and “real men” to protect them, as reflected in the yinghan (硬汉, tough guy) gender stereotype. Discourses that defined womanhood as a marker of difference from men and revaluing femininity were developed as a political tool as part of “de-Maoicization” in the 1980s (Barlow 2004, 275). The May Fourth conceptualization of nüxing, based on a heterosexist male/female binary, was recuperated in the post-Mao period as means to resist the state inscription of funü and imagine a supposedly less politicized (more individual, feminine, and consumer-oriented) “modern” Chinese woman. Some call this the “re-feminization” of Chinese women (Landsberger 1995, 144), characterized by a return to traditional sex stereotypes.
A new gender discourse of nüxing replaced the hegemonic Maoist construction of funü in the 1980s. The image of a sexualized, glamorous nüxing (as a gender category) or nüren (female human, used more often to refer to individual women) is constructed through the post-Mao nüxing discourse, in contradistinction to what now seems to some a ridiculous, unnatural, overly politicized, and sexless Maoist funü. The post-Mao nüxing differs from the “masculinized” politically oriented Maoist funü by her more “natural,” “feminine” image. This backlash against the Maoist gender project is parallel to what happened in postcommunist Eastern Europe, where “tradition” was wielded to take back the state’s previous usurpation of familial patriarchal authority and recover men’s lost authority in nuclear families (Verdery 1996).13
Although the nüxing ideal seems radically different from Maoist funü, they both are a part of a heteronormative binary gender system and share the naturalization of women’s biological and social roles to reproduce children and serve their husbands—an idea that continued in the Mao era (Mann 2011). What is new is the intersection of class with the category of nüxing. As Zhong Xueping (2006) points out, the changing terms and definitions for women are accompanied by radical shifts in class composition of the category of women. The post-Mao nüxing represents a “bourgeois feminine imaginary” that is itself class-encoded, but erases the reality of class differentiations by evoking an essential “femininity” and “sexuality” (Zhong 2006, 637). She notes that such a gender conceptualization reduces women’s issues to questions of “femininity” and “sexuality,” ascribes a bourgeois class-based gender ideal as the universal “female essence,” marginalizes the reality of class and class differentiations, and negates the socioeconomic aspects of gender politics.
China’s Neoliberal Transition and the Diversification of Gender Discourse
In the Soviet Union, wholesale economic transformation through an abrupt suspension of the state-planned economy and switch to a free market was accompanied by the collapse of the political regime. In contrast, China’s economic restructuring was initiated and gradually implemented by the CCP as a deliberate strategy, and it occurred without substantial political overhaul in the regime. China’s neoliberal transition is a gradual, controlled, and intentional process, entwined with its part voluntary and part coerced integration with neoliberal globalization—a so-called socialism with Chinese characteristics (L. Zhang 2008; Rofel 2007; Y. Huang 2008).
In China, gender is a critical ideological site for legitimizing the adoption of neoliberal practices and the attempt to construct a neoliberal model alternative to the Western paradigm. Charlie Yi Zhang (2014) demonstrates that the reconstruction of Chinese (and Asian) femininity and masculinity is essential in the Chinese state’s efforts to fuse Western neoliberal hegemony with an authoritarian politic-ideological tradition. This includes reimagining Chinese masculinity and femininity, as well as queerness, and reconstructing the consumer-oriented gender subjectivities under neoliberal market logic.
The turning away from the emphasis on class to gender differences conceals the Chinese nation-state’s agenda of using gender to address social tensions and unify the splintering society (C. Y. Zhang 2016). Ironically, the new gender discourse of nüxing and the emphasis on gender differences, initially developed by post-Mao feminists as a mean to resist state control, has been taken up by the post-Mao transition to a market economy and incorporated into the neoliberal agenda. The “real man” (nanzihan) ideal of the early 1980s, inspired by humanism, has turned into the “market man” under neoliberalism, and the nüxing subject has also become a primarily market-oriented identity.14 Nüxing is now primarily a consumer-oriented subject associated with younger, educated, urban women from the emerging middle class.
The transition to a neoliberal governance “with Chinese characteristics,” and China’s eager integration into the world economy also opened space for diversified gender articulations. Post-Mao gender discourses are not only influenced by China’s neo-liberal transition but also shaped by the interaction between Chinese and many other foreign ideas, especially the introduction of contemporary Western feminisms and more recently the transnational queer movement, as well as postcolonial, Third World, and transnational feminisms. The influence of globalization, the direct exchanges between Chinese scholars and feminists abroad, the hosting of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, and increased international funding for women’s organizations and gender projects in China have brought new language and analytical categories and influenced the framing of theoretical and analytical perspectives in feminist studies and popular understanding about gender through feminist interventions in policy and media (B. Liu 1999; Du 2001).
The transnational flow of people and ideas since the 1978 beginning of China’s open-door policy has enabled many Chinese people to experience traveling or living outside of China and exposed many more to foreign ideas and ways of life. Compared with the relatively monolithic gender landscape in the Mao era and the period immediately after it, gender discourses in the new millennium are characterized by heterogeneity and hybridity. Female masculinity, androgyny, nonbinary gender articulation, metrosexuality, and transgender identity, though still marginal, are competing with the normative ideas of femininity and masculinity (X. Huang 2014). China’s transition also facilitated the development of an increasingly publicly visible gay and lesbian community since the 1990s. The emerging of lesbian identities not only problematized funü and nüxing as heteronormative categories that were supposed to represent “Chinese women” but also opened up new possibilities for nonheterosexual nonbinary gender articulations.
Many young women in the present era have distanced themselves from the term funü, associated with the Mao era and the older generation of socialist women. Although nüxing is in marked contrast to the socialist ideal of funü, their success in China’s new market economy is built on the often taken-for-granted legacy of Maoist women’s liberation. The Maoist gender project did provide equal access to education for many women, encouraged their participation in the public labor force, and made it possible for many to enter or imagine entering traditionally male-dominated occupations. The Maoist funü and post-Mao nüxing are not necessarily separate, conflicting, and contradictory subjects, but they share the same roots. The Maoist funü is often present in various post-Mao gender constructions as the constitutive other. Furthermore, the Maoist idea of gender equality laid an ideological and social foundation for many women to participate and succeed in the post-Mao market economy and imagine all the different possibilities of being a woman.
In short, rather than being passé, the gender legacy of the Mao era is embedded in the post-Mao construction of gender models, interacting with multiple gender discourses circulating in China, Chinese and foreign, old and new. Examining the gender legacy of the Mao era is therefore necessary for remembering the past, understanding the present, and imagining the future.
Feminist Studies of Women’s Lives in the Mao Era
There are two main bodies of literature relevant to this book and to which it aims to make a contribution. One is the field of empirical study documenting women’s experience with the Maoist women’s liberation project; the other is scholarly works reflecting and analyzing the gender construction of the Mao era and its legacy.
In the vein of documenting women’s experience, the materials my research gathered are part of ongoing feminist efforts to document women’s lives and experiences through recording personal narratives and is part of a growing body of literature on the Maoist women’s liberation and its effects on women’s lives. While there are memoirs written by women of an educated elite who lived through the Mao era,15 ordinary women’s experience and voices increasingly contribute to the representation and discussion. Several feminist scholars in China have undertaken projects recording women experiences. One representative body of work is the book series by leading feminist scholar Li Xiaojiang (2003), titled Ershi Shiji Zhongguo Funü Koushushi (二十世纪中国妇女口述史, Twentieth Century Chinese Women’s Oral History). These books and projects provide important empirical materials for studying Maoist gender ideas, and this book is intended to contribute to the feminist archiving creation effort. It aims to facilitate self-representations by the ordinary women who are often forgotten in history, whose stories are largely unheard or only told in the third person.
There are increasing numbers of historical, literary, anthropological, and sociological studies relating to women’s lives in the Mao period and their post-Mao influence.16 Although these works often contain information about and reflection on the impact of the Maoist gender ideas in the post-Mao era, they do not focus on the analysis of the gender legacy of the Mao era and the assessment of its contemporary significance per se. Two important books that analyze ordinary women’s lives from the Mao and post-Mao eras based on detailed oral life stories have recently appeared. One is Gail Hershatter’s The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (2011). The book demonstrates how party-state policy became local and personal and how it affected women’s work, personal lives, and political participation, as well as their notions of virtue and respectability in the 1950s. Although the rural women narrated their past from the present, the focus of the analysis is on reconstructing history, rather than investigating its contemporary significance. The second book is Harriet Evans’s The Subject of Gender: Mothers and Daughters in Urban China (2008). The book demonstrates how changing gender practices and representations in the Mao and post-Mao eras shaped the lives of women from different generations. Although some of the stories analyzed in her book reveal the impact of Maoist ideas—for instance, the separation of mother and child during the Mao era and its impact on ideas about motherhood for the daughters—Evans’s focus is on intergenerational connection and comparison. Both books work primarily with women’s personal narratives and try to preserve the coherence and individuality of these narratives by putting individuals at the forefront, with names and faces. However, both books are structured thematically; individual stories play illustrative roles for the topics.
My study of the Maoist gender legacy in contemporary China builds on and hopes to extend the above scholarly works by listening to ordinary women’s oral narratives about their lives, which span a series of changing models of what it means to be and appear to be a woman, with a specific focus on how the gender legacy of the Mao era is manifested in women’s lives today and narratives about them.
Feminist Theorizing on Gender and Chinese Context
In this study, I draw on existing feminist thoughts on gender and sexuality, combined with my own concept of gender (as) project. Euro-Anglo feminists’ attempts to theorize gender were initially driven by a desire to establish an epistemological foundation for gender equality and counter the biological determinism derived from European biomedical science—the view that biology is destiny. They started to understand gender as a combination of culturally specific roles, behaviors, and symbols attached to anatomical sex; sexual difference is the foundation for gendered roles, and the combination of sex and gender codifies a wide range of social hierarchies (Millett 1971; Stoljar 1995; Haslanger 2000). Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that “one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman” (de Beauvoir 1989) is taken as a claim about gender socialization. Gayle Rubin, for instance, used the phrase “sex/gender system” and described gender as the “socially imposed division of the sexes” (Rubin 1975, 179).
The gender/sex distinction has been criticized in recent decades for failing to consider differences among women and for positing a normative ideal.17 For instance, Judith Butler (1993) argues that “woman” (as well as “man”) does not exist in a presocial or prediscursive state. Gender attributes are understood not as expressive of a preexisting condition but as producing that condition: gender is a performative accomplishment. In Bodies That Matter, Butler questions the distinction between gender and sex and argues that both are socially constructed. She argues that sex as sexual difference is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs. Butler’s works theorize and affirm the value of gay/lesbian and trans practices and provided the epistemological foundation for an inclusive queer politics that challenges patriarchy and heterosexual hegemony.
The social movement led by women of color and particularly black feminists questioned the single-axis framework of the analysis of oppression centered on gender. The concept of intersectionality was introduced in the late 1980s to call for analyses that focus on the interlocking systems of oppression in which gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, religion, caste, and other axes of identity intersect on multiple and often simultaneous levels, contributing to systemic injustice and social inequality (Crenshaw 1989; Collins 2000; McCall 2005; Nash 2008). Intersectionality not only enables an “analytic sensibility” (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013, 795) that could investigate multiple and intersectional dimensions of experiences of marginalization and oppression, it also examines the ideological structures in which subjects, problems, and solutions are framed (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall, 2013).
These feminist theories are developed to represent the interests of the groups of women they seek to speak about and for, and for the political agenda situated in a specific historical and political context. Furthermore, they also derived from certain intellectual traditions. Euro-Anglo feminist theories have the roots in the Western theoretical tradition.18 For instance, Rubin’s theorizing of the gender/sex distinction has its intellectual roots in Marxism, structuralism, anthropology, and psychoanalytic theories. In addition to roots in feminist tradition, Butler’s theory of gender performativity is also influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, phenomenology, structural anthropology, and speech-act theory. The articulation of intersectionality was initially started in the US legal academy; the thought is influenced by intellectual traditions arising from black feminism, ethnic studies, and community activism and is informed by and provides theoretical tools for an antisexism and antiracism agenda of the black feminist movement.
Would these theories about gender that developed from different historical, political, and intellectual traditions work in a Chinese context? Some scholars argue against using these concepts developed in the West in explaining Chinese gender configurations (Louie and Edwards 1994; X. Li 1999). I discuss my answer to this question and explain my strategy.
Ideas about gender and sex in traditional China are derived from the Chinese cosmological understanding of the human body, which understands the categories of gender and sex as fluid and dynamic. The Chinese conception of physiology draws on classical Chinese medical, philosophical, and religious systems. They are different from the Western anatomical perspectives derived from European biomedical science, which perceives the human body as an ensemble of discrete parts, ascribing a function to each part from the skull to the toes (Schiebinger 1989; Laqueur 1990). In traditional China, the human body was understood as a microcosm that corresponded to the cosmos, made up of the primordial element, the qi (气, force). Qi is regulated by two opposite complementary forces, yin (阴) and yang (阳); yin is associated with cold, moisture, darkness, passivity, the moon, and the feminine, whereas yang connotes brightness, heat, the sun, activity, and the masculine (Sivin 1987; N. N. Chen 2002). Huangdi (黄帝, the Yellow Emperor), regarded as the ancestor of all Han Chinese, had the classic Chinese body, which has no morphological sex but is androgynous, blessed with a perfect balance of yin and yang (Furth 1999). Contrary to the West, where sexual differences are understood as residing in the genitalia and the so-called reproductive organs, the categories of male and female in traditional Chinese thinking were explained in terms of the relative predominance of yin and yang.19 In other words, the body is a site in which both elements figure in different combinations, varying from person to person and within the same individual according to age, seasons, weather, diet, and circumstances. Consequently, sexual differences are understood as moving along “a continuum of probability” (Bray 1997, 235).
This cosmological understanding of the human body and sex was transformed into hierarchical gender configurations, exemplified by the two pillars of Confucian gender ethics (Ko 1994; Hinsch 2002): the dictum of “three obediences” or sancong (三从, obedience to the father before marriage, to the husband after marriage, and to the son after the husband’s death) and the doctrine of neiwai (内外, separate inner and outer spheres), with nanzhuwai, nüzhunei (男主外, 女主内, men associated with the outer and women with the inner). Nevertheless, the ideas of fluid and complementary relationships between yin and yang remained in the conceptualization of the gender system. For instance, many scholars have pointed out that the inner/outer are overlapping spheres with fluid boundaries (Ropp 1993; Bray 1997; Furth 1999; Mann 2002; Goodman and Larson 2005)
In terms of the relationship between gender, sex, and sexuality, the contextual and fluid understanding of differences remained. Furth (1999) argues that in traditional Chinese ideas about gender difference, social gender overshadowed anatomical sex and sexuality in the definition of the categories of male and female: the way one acted as masculine or feminine was often more important than one’s anatomy. Furth (1999) has shown that medical discourse in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties blurred the lines of sex and gender so that physical difference and change were appraised in terms of the capacity to fulfill normative social roles. One became socially male or female to the extent that one played a specific sexual role. Kinship is another important factor in defining a woman’s powers and differentiating among different groups of women (Ebrey 1993, 2003), and the Confucian conception of gender was constructed primarily around a woman’s kinship position as daughter, wife, or mother (Barlow 1994, 2004). The primacy of social role over anatomical sex in defining gender can also be observed in Jennifer Jay’s (1993) analysis of the gender of eunuchs. She concludes that castrated eunuchs remained unquestionably male, their sexuality remained heterosexual in orientation. The Qing juridical files showed that an individual became socially male or female by playing a specific sexual role, and the focus of judicial anxiety was not the sex of the object of a man’s desire but who penetrated whom and in what context (Sommer 2002). Furthermore, rather than seeking to locate gender exclusively in either social roles or natural (bodily) attributes, Chinese gender conceptions in fact encompassed both, and the Chinese categories of male and female were understood as both natural and social (Furth 1999, 7–8).
The ways gender, sex, and body were conceptualized in China reveal that these categories are socially constructed and culturally specific and offer alternative ways to understand them. Ironically, the nonessentializing view of the human body and sexual difference and privileging the social over anatomical sex in defining gender seem to contain much “liberating” potential, yet this did not stop the dominance of an oppressive Confucian gender regime in traditional China. Although the privileged could enjoy the freedom of movement across the inner/outer (Ko 1992) and the transgression of gender orders, those who were driven by poverty to trespass these boundaries often experienced stigmatization (Rofel 1999; Luo 2005). Edwards’s research shows that although cross-dressing and gender fluidity became a popular phenomenon in late Ming/early Qing (seventeenth–eighteenth century) China, among male and female literati and in literary cultural productions, the fluidity and violations of social norms were manipulated by patriarchal interests to consolidate rather than challenge the Confucian social and moral order (Edwards 1994, 181). Zeitlin demonstrated that the popular cross-dressing nüzhong haojie (女中豪杰, heroes among women) in Ming-Qing romantic fiction and drama were tolerated or sometimes encouraged, as their adoption of male attributes are for accomplishing the goals that consolidate the patriarchal order (Zeitlin 1993, 130).
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during China’s search for path to a strong modern nation, power, and wealth, Western ideas such as social Darwinism anarchism, humanism, Marxism, and feminism were introduced. With traditional Confucian gender system criticized as one of the reasons for China’s “backwardness,” the Chinese cosmological paradigm about body, sex, and gender was also challenged.
In Datongshu (大同书, The Book of One World), Kang Youwei (1935) positioned gender equality and gender issues as at the center of social transformation. Kang and his disciple Liang Qichao believed that the backwardness of Chinese women impeded the evolution of the Chinese nation and argued that a strong nation and an intelligent people begin with women’s education (Liang 1928). They organized the first Chinese anti-footbinding society in 1883 and made great efforts to institutionalize women’s education, supported Jing Yuanshan to open the first Chinese girls’ school in Shanghai in 1898 (Z. Wang 1999). In Nüjie Zhong (女界钟, The Women’s Bell), the most influential publication on women’s liberation in the late Qing, Jin Tianhe (1903) advocated a Western concept of liberal civil rights and women’s rights. Many Western-oriented Chinese intellectuals, such as Chen Duxiu urged replacing Chinese knowledge with Western science and Chinese medicine with biomedicine, which was perceived as the one of the secrets of the West’s dominance. Ironically, Western conceptualizations of gender and sex were imported together with Western feminism as part of the epistemological foundation for an imagined gender-equal “modern” Western society at the time when the suffrage movement in the West was still under way. As Z. Wang (1999) points out, although feminism was a marginal discourse in the West, it was considered part of the universal truth and an indicator of a higher stage of civilization. Modern Chinese intellectuals adopted feminism as a crucial strategy for China’s advancement to a modern nation-state and as a discursive practice for gaining power.
The Western scientific construction of body-based systems of gender was introduced to China and began influencing popular understanding of gender. Numerous childbirth manuals and medical treatises were produced in the 1920s and 1930s to initiate the public into the biomedical language of the body (Dikötter 1995). Chiang Yung-chens (2006) research shows that the discourse of exalted motherhood popular in the 1920s and 1930s was based on a mixture of biological determinism, eugenics, and sexology translated from Japan, the United States, and Europe. The new category of women, the nüxing, a product of these new conceptualizations of gender, defined by sexual physiology and based on a Western, exclusionary male/female binary (Barlow 1994, 2004), is a constitutive part of the modern male subject in a modern China imagined by the male Chinese intellectuals (Wang, Ko, and Liu 2004; Liu, Karl, and Ko 2013).20 Meanwhile, traditional Chinese ideas were also competing for dominance. For instance, the Xin Shenghuo Yundong (新生活运动, New Life Movement) initiated by the ruling Nationalist Party in the 1930s, promoted a Confucian code of moral conduct, combined with elements drawn from nationalism, fascism, and Japanese militarism, and Christianity (Thomson 1969).
As outlined above, although traditional Chinese conceptualizations of gender originated from a different epistemological framework from those in the West, ideas of gender in twentieth-century China were heavily influenced by various Western discourses on body, gender, and sexuality. The discourses of the earlier twentieth century indicate a new feature of gender conception: the coexistence of multiple and often contradictory discourses about gender, body, and sexuality, Chinese and foreign, old and new, and the production of hybrid discourses and gender subjectivities that combine Western and Chinese understandings.
With the establishment of the PRC came another important stage in the reformulation of gender perception—also characterized by combinations of multiple gender discourses. The Maoist gender discourse was not just based on a Marxist reframing of the “woman question” and class analysis, informed by some key feminist concepts of women’s rights and gender equality in the early twentieth-century global context; it also carried on the eugenics discourse and sacred motherhood ideology of the 1920s and discussions on scientific womanhood, health, and sport from the 1930s as well as retaining some traditional Chinese beliefs (Manning 2006a). Kimberley Manning’s (2009) research reveals that some leading figures in the All-China Women’s Federation in the 1950s who had been educated at missionary schools promoted a “maternalist” approach to women’s roles that echoed the discourse of some Christian missionaries. On one hand, the popular slogan “women can do whatever men can do” promoted the erasure of gender difference and implied an anti-essentialist and social constructionist view of gender; on the other hand, the CCP’s Marxist maternalist position emphasized women’s biological difference (Manning 2006a). The “scientific construction” of sexuality in the Mao era also puts forward an essentialized biological determinist approach to gender based on sexual difference (Evans 1997). Although gender discourses in the Mao era are radically different in many ways than the traditional notions that preceded it, many pre-Mao ideas did not disappear overnight; some were incorporated into the new discourses, and some persisted, like the specter haunting the present gender construction, still circulating and competing for dominance.
Perceptions of gender in China today are the result of the historical process of Chinese–Western interaction and local–global interplay. Over the past century people in China have experienced the disruption and overthrow of ideas about sex and gender models that were once hegemonic, and the radical promotion of new models. Different debates about gender interact to constitute various gender configurations that are often hybrid and constantly evolving.
Gender (as) Project and Subversion Strategy
Western feminist theorizing about gender and sex coincides with traditional Chinese conceptualizations in many ways. For example, gender is not necessarily tied to a biological essence but is performative (e.g., castrated eunuchs remaining male and heterosexual); it is also understood as a social and cultural category. Gender difference is contextual and fluid and thus socially manipulatable (e.g., Mao’s slogan of “shidai butong le, nannü dou yiyang, nantongzhi neng bandao de shiqing, nütongzhi ye neng ban de dao” [时代不同了, 男女都一样, 男同志能办到的事情, 女同志也能办得到, the times are different now, men and women are the same, whatever male comrades can do, female comrades can do too]). Sexual difference is nonbinary, fluid, and dynamic (e.g., depends on the dynamic composition of yin and yang). It is therefore not inappropriate to use contemporary feminist theories on gender to analyze the construction of gender subjects in China today. In this book, I draw on many of these ideas to examine, in particular how gender subjectivity is constructed in and through discursive performances in some women’s oral and visual life narratives.
Nonetheless, the women’s liberation movement and consequently the changing ideas about gender, sex, and the body took a different route in China compared with countries in the West, and the different practices have implications for feminist theorizing. For instance, while some anarchist Chinese feminists such as He Yinzhen (Liu, Karl, and Ko 2013) take an antinationalist position, women’s liberation in twentieth-century China has often been aligned with first the nationalist movement and later the communist revolution, and thus are often incorporated into the official discourses and become state-sponsored projects. These projects, inspired by various feminist thoughts, among other debates on gender, often challenge and radically transform dominant ideas and gender practices, opening up space for alternative possibilities of gender. Radical changes about gender are therefore often promoted and celebrated by official discourses. For instance, the Maoist gender project represents a radical transformation of many (but not all) of the traditional Confucian notions that preceded it, such as, it encouraged women to work outside of home and feeling proud of doing so (Rofel 1999; Hershatter 2011). These endeavors involve comprehensive design, innovative strategies, and often revolutionary practices by the nation/state at the institutional level and call for theorizing that takes into account the role state plays in these transformations.
Furthermore, the radical reconfigurations of gender in China require an analysis that treats the structure of gender not as a static and stand-alone system, but as multiple and dynamic, shifting and competing, overlapping and contradictory. The hybrid construction of gender ideas in China necessarily evokes a creative use of theories and concepts, both Chinese and foreign, and a possible transformation of them (not always guaranteed). It calls for an analysis that traces historical change and cross-cultural intersections. It calls for what I call “grafting,” in which foreign ideas and concepts are appropriated and reworked through a local analysis, and new theories are produced in the process. In this book, I explore the grafting endeavor by drawing on existing feminist theories about gender and developing the concept of “gender (as) project” to analyze gendered experiences in China.
Wittig (1992) used the term “project” to refer to the repeated, obligatory corporeal endeavor of materializing the body to make the physical self become a cultural sign—a dichotomized sexual difference regulated by compulsory heterosexuality. Butler mentioned that the notion of “project” suggests “the originating force of a radical will,” and that “gender is a project which has cultural survival [of the compulsory heterosexual systems] as its end” (1990, 177). Both usages point to the “duress” (Butler 1990, 178) of structures (and history) that condition and limit the possibilities, that compel individuals to comply with normative ideas about gender, the body, and sexuality. Inspired by the connotations of the term “project,” which to me could suggest an intentional will, I use the word to emphasize the construction of gender as a purposefully designed social project at collective and individual levels, with interrelated components or sets of signifiers and often with specific contours and conscious goals. Considering gender this ways—as not just a cultural project at the structural level but also something that can be carried out by individuals—highlights personal agency throughout the process of gender construction.
Investigating gender as a project means first recognizing that it is a conscious project on which one engages, with a clear goal (a gender ideal or the reputation of one, which may change over time) one wants to put toward, such as being a housewife or a labor heroine. A gender project unfolds on this goal, and various ideological and cultural resources are drawn from to formulate ideals and strategies and construct the gender subjects. Investigating gender as a project involves identifying the goals of a gender project, or in other words, the gender subjects that it seeks to construct or deconstruct. The second task is to discern the genealogy of the inspirations of such gender projects—the multiple cultural resources that are available and mobilized in their construction, including but not limited to discourses about gender. The third step is to analyze how different sources are employed, combined, or reworked. The manifestation of these sources and their synthesis in a gender project is traced through various signifying practices, such as the articulation of concepts of gender in language, the embodiment of gender in behaviors and appearances, and, for this study, the construction of gender in and through narratives.
Understanding gender as a designed project enables me to shift the discussion of agency to the creative dimensions of action, where actors take an active approach to subvert dominant models and initiate and institute new possibilities of gender by appropriating and reworking various discourses from local and global sources. In particular, I look into the conscious design, creative synthesis, and overt or subtle subversion of gender ideas in the construction of a gender project, attending to the often conscious (but not necessarily critical) design and enactment of gender projects that cite normative ideas, marginal ones, and those that are abjected by dominant discourses.
The idea of gender as project can be used in conjunction with the concept of intersectionality, to analyze it as being situated and multidimensional, as discourses about gender are contextual and interwoven with those about class, race, and other axes of identity. For instance, class is inseparable from and intersects with gender in the Maoist gender project, so are one’s political attitude and often China’s socialist and Third World status within Cold War international politics (see chapters 1 and 2). At the individual level, the gender project is situated not only within a specific historical and cultural context but also ties to one’s social location as well as the nexus of power. Intersectionality provides an analytical lens to see how categories of identities, such as gender, class (and in China’s case, urban/rural status), and the corresponding systems of domination constitute the gender ideal one wants to achieve and how discussions about these differences are mobilized in the articulation of one’s gender ideas. In my analysis, I investigate the manifestation of intersecting structure exercises power and domination and the dynamic interplay of different meanings and interpretations of identities and differences, between and within categories. In so doing, I emphasize the creative potential intersectionality opens up for gender subversion and agency. For instance, individuals may strategically highlight or reinterpret certain dimension of identities to challenge discrimination and oppression.
The unique path the women’s liberation movement took in China suggests a rethinking of feminist discussions regarding structure and agency, in particular the role of the nation/state in gender construction and subversion. Rather than treating the intervention on gender by the nation/state as always already anti–gender equality and what is sanctioned as norm as being by default oppressive, gender as project allows a feminist analysis that recognizes the creative and subversive potential opened up by some state-sponsored interventions (with its own agenda) and radical changes at the structural level (such as the Maoist gender project) and the complex influence of them on individual gender projects. In other words, creative and subversive potential can be accomplished in gender projects envisioned at both collective and individual levels, top-down or bottom-up.
Situated in specific social context and conditioned by history, viewing gender as project reveals the process of active engagement with various discourses about gender and other identities and the creative and potentially subversive ways of imagining and practicing gender project. New possibilities emerge from the conflict and gap between multiple discourses and languages about gender, class, and other categories of difference, through the redirection of trajectory or reconfiguration of previous arrangements, via switches and shifts, displacement and realignment.
While the construction of the gender project happens at various national, group, and individual levels, my examination explores how as a source of gender construction, the gender legacy of the Mao era is manifested, revised, and subverted at the individual level. In the stories conveyed herein, each woman enacts an individual gender project in her gender practice and through her narrative, citing not only the current norms but also other gender models, often represented by female family members of an older generation.
Gender and Narrative
Feminist autobiography studies (which has lately been extended to life narratives of various forms) and feminist narrative studies provide frameworks for examining the narrative practices this book engages. Feminist autobiography studies argue that systems of meaning are never value-neutral but bear the social marks of their originators and their receivers. “Autobiography” as a genre in the West has a particular history, and the autobiographical “I” has been a sign of the enlightenment subject that is unified, rational, coherent, autonomous, and free, who is also by default white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, and Western. The implication is that autobiographical authorization was unavailable to most women as well as the “others” of that default I. For instance, Sidonie Smith (1987) argues that when narrating their lives, women often have difficulty adjusting to narrative forms derived from masculine models and norms and tend to see themselves through the lenses of patriarchal culture that fictionalized “woman.” Maria Brewer (1984) claims that the classic “plot” of many male life stories reveals a “discourse of male desire recounting itself through the narrative of adventure, project, enterprise, and conquest,” with the conquest often including that of a woman. Susan Lanser (1986) showed that the ways traditional narrative theorists defined plot assumed a power and possibility available to the hero that may be inconsistent with women’s experiences or desires. Women’s lives thus are often seen as “plotless” in traditional narratology, aside from the predictable fate (assumed to be fulfillment) of marriage and motherhood.
When participating in narrative practices, women need to be cautious in adopting or adapting established models and strategies, including assumptions about genre, plot, style, or rhetoric. The adoption of these master scripts leads to reproducing dominant ideologies and fictions about women, denarrativizing women’s lives, and a consequent distortion of women’s experience. For instance, Smith (1987) points out that women often convey their feelings, experiences, hopes, and identities in a way that lives up to conventional patriarchal notions of being female and tend to prioritize partnership in a heterosexual marriage above female friendship, the joys of domestic life over their desire for more education, or envy of men’s more public life, rather than longing for community with other women. Following master scripts may make women a “muted group” by depriving them of the potential for complex self-representation, self-knowledge, or the power and nourishment such knowledge can bring, ultimately reproducing the structures of domination.
Feminist criticism of traditional autobiography also points out that its form is not just patriarchal and masculine but also heterosexist. The criticism calls for reexamining the unreflective assumption of heterosexuality as a norm. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) argued, knowledge is constrained by and modeled on ideologies that support heterosexuality. William Stephenson (2000) notes that traditional narrative systems are dominated by a “heteronarrative,” organized around the patriarchal goals of marriage and reproduction, enforcing compulsory heterosexuality. Marilyn Farwell points out that the traditional narrative as an “institution” depends on “gender and sexuality alignments” and normative sexual expectations; its narrative patterns are the condition of and reaffirm a heterosexual dyad with male centrality (Farwell 1996, 26, 41). Most literary representations of women have been based on “the plot of heterosexual romance” (Abraham 1996, xix), even those produced by women, making lesbian experiences unrepresentable and invisible (Hallett 1999, 79).
While women must be cautious about the Western, heteronormative, and androcentric tradition of autobiography, autobiographical writing is instrumental in giving voice to formerly silenced subjects. Feminists engaged with narrative politics argue that being fully narrativized is about articulate subjugated subjectivity, because a complex self-representation is the path to self-knowledge and reveals complex subjectivities. For instance, bell hooks (1989) argues that writing autobiography enables her to gain self-knowledge for growth and change, and remembering experiences nonsynchronous with dominant culture also counters some of the damaging effects of domination and is the activity of cultural and personal survival.
Feminist autobiography studies have explored ways in which women’s self-representations contest master scripts. This involves resisting both the pressure of masculine autobiography as the only literary genre available for her enterprise and the female ideals that are largely a fantasy of the masculine imagination (B. Johnson 1987). The autobiographical practices of women from multiple marginalities of gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and linguistic communities have been working within and against the master narrative in content and form. For example, Susan Stanford Friedman (1988) points out that women’s autobiographies often privilege relationality, community, and interdependence, setting the subject as existing with others, rather than opposing to, outside of, or against others.
Feminists called for rewriting the master scripts and have proposed and practiced various strategies. They seek narrative structures that “shift the terms of representation, and (…) produce the conditions of representability of another—and gendered—social subject” (Smith 1987, 109). To make the meaning and experience of being a woman speakable, symbolized, and heard, women are seeking or inventing ways of representing themselves, to construct and convey their “other” subjectivity (Violi 1992). Nancy Miller (1988) and Susan Lanser (1986) urge women to seek new linguistic and narrative forms to convey their attempts to “make sense” of their lives. Consciousness-raising groups, personal narratives, and women-to-women talks are examples of such efforts, where women are encouraged to go beyond standard vocabulary and labels and collaboratively develop topics of analysis. Smith suggests that a “women-centered and woman-defined discourse” (1987, 59) is required so that women’s experiences and feelings can be represented in their narratives. Luce Irigaray (1985) also showed that women can implicitly place quotation marks around such accounts, showing in subtle ways that they are quoting from a prescribed script, consciously performing a role and therefore potentially questioning or contesting it by revealing it as impersonation or masquerade. Many women in the West have attempted to experiment with “alternative languages of self and storytelling,” including consciously describing experiences that would not be considered interesting or appropriate autobiographical material by traditional male standards and trying out new forms or media of expression (Smith 1987). Barbara Rodríguez (1999) illustrates that women writers of color in the United States contend, resist, rewrite, and adapt formal conventions of autobiography contoured to the experiences of men (such as slave narratives) or white women (sentimental novels) and transform the structures and convention of the genre to reflect their race, class, and gender through innovative formal and narrative strategies (e.g., polyvocality, shifting presumed marginalities, and strategies of silence).
While recognizing autobiography as one of the cultural formations in the West implicated in and complicit with processes of colonization, postcolonial feminists also explore the ways a colonized subject can speak through alternative cultural practices, such as nonlinear or nondevelopmental narrative modes and indigenous cultural practices. For instance, Françoise Lionnet (1989) argues that historically silenced subjects such as women and colonized peoples created “braided” texts, or métissage that embrace orality, hybridity, and plurality. This is a form of intertextual weaving of styles and cultural forms such as oral tradition or dialect, which produces many voices, with polysemic meanings, and new kinds of subjects. Caren Kaplan (1992) examines the use of alternative or “out-law” narrative practices such as ethnography, biomythography, and psychobiography by women to reform autobiography modes and argues that the narrative inventions are crucial to a struggle for cultural survival rather than purely aesthetic experimentation or individual expression.
Telling and Retelling: Narrating beyond the Ending
Inspired by feminist studies on life narratives, I explored strategies to challenge the master scripts and ways to develop what Smith called a “women-centered and woman-defined discourse.” Although some may question the concept of a “women-centered and woman-defined discourse” as being essentialist, I follow Linda Alcoff’s (1988, 405) conceptualization of gender positionality and understand that a differentiated woman’s voice is derived from one’s gendered social location of being constructed, socialized, and positioned as a woman in a male-dominant world, rather than from one’s biology. The focus is thus not on the sex of the narrator as a predetermined condition of “feminine” narrative production, nor did I assume a correspondence between a subject’s sex, gender, and sexuality. Rather, I trace how gender is constructed in women’s lives not prior to but through the process of becoming a woman and in the narrative processes, and analyze the gendered context in which specific women’s lives are situated and their narratives are produced, intersecting with other identity components. Furthermore, although we need to avoid essentializing women and be critical toward the cultural constructions of “woman” and of “difference,” as Riley (1988) notes, it is still politically productive to take women as an analytical cartography while continuing to resist the fixedness of particular forms of “woman” and “femininity.”
In my study I used a “telling and retelling” interview method and regional speech and hybrid languages in the interviewing process. The conventional way of conducting a life-story interview is the “stream of consciousness” (Atkinson 1998, 32) approach, in which a researcher invites participants to tell their life stories with minimal interruption and intervention. The researcher will ask open-ended questions only when necessary to elicit the telling of the life story and to encourage the narrator to continue. It is generally recommended that in a life-story interview, the fewer questions asked, the better (Atkinson 1998, 42). Letting the narrator hold the floor not only leads to the free association of thoughts, it also makes possible analysis of what has been called the participant’s “meaning-frame” (Hollway and Jefferson 2000), which is the way she organizes and phrases her life, thoughts, and feelings.
There are limitations to this interviewing method because of the masculine conventions traditional narrative forms convey, as discussed already. Women often unconsciously follow a dominant paradigm of what is important and worth telling and minimize or leave out certain gender-specific experiences. It is hard to go beyond and revise master scripts when employing only the conventional life-story interview method, when the storyteller is not intentionally reflective about her choice of narrative models.
Rachel DuPlessis (1985) asserts that one way to subvert and rewrite master narratives so that women can be represented is to change the conventional patterns of narrative closure. She suggests a “writing beyond the ending” (1985, 4) strategy that rejects the “happily ever after” endings of fairy tales (see also Miller 1988). Feminist critics and theorists who work on lesbian autobiography argue that differences in desire change an autobiographical narrative’s content and form. Lesbians can disrupt patriarchal narrative conventions through excess, manipulation, and alternative plots as they narrate “within, under, and beside accepted narratives” (Johnston 2007, 7).
How can narrating beyond the ending be facilitated in an oral life-story context? It is a common practice that after the interview, some researchers review the content and ask further questions for elaboration or clarification about specific issues that might have been left out in the initial interview. Sometimes, the interviewees have the chance to retell or revise their account, more than once, each time with renewed memory and interpretations about her life. In this study, I have consciously divided the life-story interviews into two parts: in the first part, the research participant tells her life story straightforwardly, as she sees fit, and in the second she retells part of it, in the form of a conversation, with my probing through open-ended questions.
The first telling gives prominence to the narrator’s agency and imagination, as she decides not only the content but also the structure of the story.21 It enables me to examine the representation and interpretation of her life through both the content and the narrative form. The second telling is a conversation about gender-related experiences, such as family relationships and love, partnership or marriage, and female friendships, pregnancy (or abortion), childbirth, motherhood, menstruation, and menopause. In the retelling I invited them to talk about their gender ideals, comment on their understanding of gender, sense of self, femininity, gender roles, and their practices of signifying gender, such as fashion and style. At the end, I asked each woman to reflect on the storytelling process and give her assessment of her life. The second telling is also a chance to explore important content and themes that are eluded in the first telling. I used a checklist of themes and questions adapted from the sample life-story interview questions provided by Atkinson (1998, 43–54) with some revisions.22 I made notes when I listened to each life story and invited further commentary on any aspects that seemed to be missing (e.g., the absence of the father in the story). By attending to what was missing in the first telling, I gained a more in-depth understanding of each woman’s life, based not only on what was told but what was initially untold.
My questions often triggered the participant’s memories and led her to tell more stories that revealed unexpected or hidden aspects of her life, as well as encouraging her to comment on gendered related topics and freely discuss them. The life story told in the first part is often invaded, revised, or replaced by the retelling and reflection in the second part. Contradictions and conflicts often emerge, as will be seen in the four stories that I analyze in depth. In my analysis, I indicate whether the narrative extracts are from the first or second part of the interview when I cite them; this should help the reader contextualize the narratives and speculate on the gains of the retelling.
Both the life-story interview as an event and particularly the second telling as an interview method are narrative interventions. They introduced a feminist script inspired by feminist research agenda and methodology. The oral life-story interview is a new form of research and social activism practice that was introduced to China in recent decades. For most of my participants, it was the first time in their lives to be interviewed with a particular script: the telling of an ordinary woman’s life story. The very act of asking an ordinary woman to tell stories about her life is a feminist autobiographic narrative invitation, suggesting that an ordinary woman’s life is worth telling and being heard. The ways the interviews are designed and structured introduced a narrative script that focuses on an individual woman’s life as an independent subject of narration and history.
Although my interview method contains a prestructured script that conditioned and structured the narrative practice, this script aims to challenge the masculinity and heterosexual master scripts and explore strategies of creating women’s self-defined narratives. The study is a collaborative process in which the researcher and the participants work together to explore alternative ways of telling, knowing, and representing women’s lives. Although many researchers practice retelling or follow-up interviews, I use retelling with a conscious attempt to challenge the master scripts and find the women-centered and woman-defined discourse. The collaboration creates a feminist narrative project that goes beyond the usual narrative conventions of what is worth telling and how, and becomes a joined endeavor enabling conflicting desires and previously unrepresentable experiences to emerge and be conveyed through narratives. As demonstrated in the book, the gaps, contradictions, and revisions between the two parts of the storytelling bring hidden aspects and emotions to the foreground. The telling and retelling often empower the narrator as she gains self-knowledge through telling her life as a woman and reflecting on it. In the analysis, I discuss the operation of various master scripts, how they are manifested and negotiated in the participant’s narratives, and the encounter between them and the method introduced by my research.
Hybrid Language, Code Switching, and Alternative Storytelling
Gender is established and represented discursively through language (with all the problems of translation that entails). The choice of narrative structure and words may deploy stereotypes about women’s modes of self-expression or display resistance to them. Oral narrative has the advantage of revealing directly how the narrators negotiate the use of a particular language, such as through pause, silence, hesitations, and repetition. In this study, I examined not only the content and structure of the life narratives but also the use and negotiation of the languages in the narrative process. I trace how discourses and languages about gender and other differences crossing time and place have been mobilized and combined in personal life narratives to formulate specific individual gender projects. One of the ways individuals exercise their agency and formulate subversive strategies is through a narrative practice of code switching. I observed that my participants often use the strategy of cross-language term-borrowing or code switching to developing an alternative language of gender in their narratives.
“Chinese” is an umbrella term for many different forms of written and spoken Chinese languages. Spoken Chinese comprises many regional varieties, and the English word “dialect” is often used to translate the Chinese term fangyan (方言, regional speech) for these varieties.23 Some fangyan are not mutually intelligible. For instance, Guangdonghua (广东话, Cantonese), which is spoken in Hong Kong and some parts of south China, is incomprehensible for a Mandarin-only speaker. Mandarin is a category of related Chinese fangyan spoken across most of northern and southwest China, and biaozhun Putonghua (标准普通话, standard Mandarin) refers to the Beijing fangyan of the Mandarin language. In mainland China, Putonghua (普通话, Mandarin) is the official spoken language and the entire educational system is in Mandarin.24 The contemporary Chinese written language is based on the grammar and vocabulary of Mandarin.25 Speakers of different fangyan of Chinese have historically used one single formal written language (with regional variations in vocabulary). The range of women I was able to interview in China led me to consider code switching between fangyan (regional speech) or multiple (or hybrid) languages as an important practice in opening up alternative ways of telling their lives.
I conducted four interviews in the participants’ hometown regional speech Sichuan fangyan (四川方言, Sichuan regional speech), which I speak), rather than using Mandarin (see chapter 2). Many people speak their own fangyan at home and often only speak Mandarin at school and on official or professional occasions. Even for those interviews I conducted in Mandarin, many participants from time to time resorted to using certain expressions unique to their local fangyan (for people from the north, this means variations of Mandarin), to articulate certain reactions and feelings. The stories analyzed in chapter 2 show that although fangyan is not immune to the invasion of official discourses, and its use may not necessarily prevent participants from resorting to master scripts in the representation of their experience, speaking fangyan nonetheless help creating space for more narrative agency and for alternative ways of telling and interpreting lives.
Three of the fifteen participants had studied or lived outside of China. When they told their life stories (one in the Sichuan fangyan) to me, they sometimes used English words in their narratives. The use of English words was partially facilitated by the specific narrative context, when both participant and researcher spoke the same second language. One lesbian artist who has had long exposure to transnational queer culture and the global gay network, also used English to evoke certain queer issues (see chapter 3). As the analysis herein demonstrates, the practice of code switching opens up interesting potentials to disrupt the dominant, masculine, and heterosexual language system representing a culture that tends to obscure women’s and lesbians’ experience and desires.
The use of alternative and hybrid language not only brings a hybrid quality to the narrative exchange, offering alternative ways of telling women’s lives, it also evokes the translation, appropriation, and synthesizing of different ideological resources. The narrative practice of code switching thus introduces alternative language of gender and meaning frame, opens up the potential for challenging dominant gender prescriptions, and facilitates the imagination and legitimacy of different possibilities of gendered existence as well as the construction of intersecting, complex, and transnational gender subjectivities.
Research Process and Data
The book is based on my fieldwork in Beijing, China, in 2006–2007, in which I recorded fifteen oral life stories of women from a wide range of backgrounds living in Beijing but coming from different parts of China. An advantage of choosing Beijing as the major site for interviewing is that as the biggest destination for relocation within China, it is an ideal place to find women with different backgrounds and from various regions. I kept in contact with some of the participants and met some of them in my subsequent trips to China in 2010–2011, 2013, and 2015.
I approached the women through a snowballing method, via my acquaintances and personal network. Some are my friends or former colleagues, and some are friends or acquaintances of those. Four rural migrant women were recruited from a restaurant owned by a friend of mine, where they worked, and one who worked as a house cleaner was introduced by a friend. In a way, I was not a complete stranger to many of the participants, in the sense that at least someone they have a relatively long-term relationship with knew about me. I met most of the participants more than once for this project, first to introduce myself, obtain consent, and sort out logistics and then to conduct the interview at the second meeting. I arranged third meetings with some of the participants to have follow-up interviews. Most of the life-story interviews lasted two to four hours. Most were conducted at the participants’ homes when the participants offered such an option; for the rural migrant workers, one interview was done at the apartment where I stayed during my visit, and the rest took place in the office of the restaurant.
I am both an insider and outsider in this resource project. I was born in the 1960s and lived through the Mao and post-Mao eras in China. I grew up in the southwest part of China in Sichuan, and had lived in Beijing for twenty years. I witnessed the social transition in the past decades. I share the cultures and languages (including in some cases a common fanyan or the ability to speak English) and certain life experiences with many of the participants, such as working as a state employee, working in business and at foreign invested enterprises, and having studied and lived abroad. My gender identity as an educated heterosexual woman also ensured some shared experiences and understandings about life in various aspects with different participants, although my heterosexual orientation did cause some doubt in my interview with Shitou, a lesbian artist, as discussed in chapter 3. My analysis in this book thus draws on not only the life stories I recorded but also from my own life experience and personal understanding of the historical transformation in China.
I am also an outsider in various circumstances. Although I have the credibility as a friend (of a friend), a former colleague, or an acquaintance (of an acquaintance), I was also a visitor who was not directly involved with their current lives. My outsider status sometimes provided a relatively trustworthy and safe environment for my participants to tell their stories. Anonymity was guaranteed on the consent form and further secured by the fact that I would write about this study in English rather than Chinese. To ensure confidentiality, the names of the participants used in this book (except Shitou, who chose to reveal her real name) are pseudonyms.
These factors helped build trust and mutual understanding between my participants and me, and enabled some to tell me about more private issues, embarrassing and even painful moments, difficulties in life, unconventional thoughts and feelings, and dreams and desires. When I approached potential participants, I told them that as part of the research, I was gathering women’s personal life stories. Although the project was driven by my research agenda, each participant was motivated by their own reasons to accept the invitation and tell their stories. Five out of the fifteen participants asked me for a copy of the digital recording of their interviews. Two said the reason was because they wanted their daughters to hear the interview when the time was right. The audience for their stories is therefore not just me but also their daughters, imagined further listeners. The intention of their telling also includes the opportunity for communication and understanding between different generations of women and for archiving family history. Shitou also requested a copy of her interview, and following our agreement I have translated the chapter on her into Chinese for her review. Feng, a rural migrant worker who worked as a freelance house cleaner (part of her story is introduced in chapter 2), told me that in her six years of working in Beijing, this was the first time someone actually listened to her and cared to learn about her life. Anne, whose story is discussed in chapter 4, asked me if she could commission me to write her biography, as she did not have time to write it herself but felt the desire to narrate her life in a more detailed form after our four-hour interview.
Rather than being passive research subjects, most participants actively engaged in this act of self-representation and took it as an opportunity to reflect on their experience, communicate with others, and perform as agents in their lives. For some of them, the interview and the reflection were not just a one-time event but part of an ongoing process that has had a long-lasting influence on their lives and self-understanding. One participant wrote me in an email one year later that she was finally able to better answer one of the questions I had asked. My various connections with these participants also made me an active participant engaged in the narrative process rather than a detached and passive audience for the storytelling. My research goal of investigating the gender legacy of the Mao era and exploring alternative ways of telling women’s lives shaped the choices of topic, language, and structure of their narratives. The interviews became a collaborative project between researcher and participants, and the reflection of this process can be found in the discussion in each chapter.
Voice, Representation, and Interpretation
When I recorded the women’s narratives for this project, I invited them to tell their life stories, instead of asking them to answer questions specifically on the gender project of the Mao era and its legacy, although they know that this is the topic of my research. As a result, the traces of the legacy are more prominent in some stories, and there are different levels and forms of manifestation of gender legacy of the Mao era in each life story because each woman’s life is different. For the purpose of this book, I selected the most relevant, which I felt make the most substantial contribution to understandings of the topic.
Furthermore, this book explores the complexity and variations of individual gender projects as women draw on cultural, historical, political, and personal resources to make sense of themselves and their relation to the world they inhabit. To better accomplish this task, instead of extracting pieces and fragments from many research participants’ life stories to find patterns or illustrate an argument or theme, I chose to conduct in-depth analysis of four life stories. Each constitutes one chapter: one urban woman who lived through the Mao era, one rural migrant worker, one lesbian artist who has close connections with transnational queer networks, and one urban woman with the experience of living abroad. I chose the women for their distinct social locations and the different insights those locations and experiences could bring to the understanding of diverse aspects of gender construction in the Mao and post-Mao eras.
Feminist research is at the forefront of challenging traditional research methodology and exploring ways to carve out space for competing voices and diverse accounts of individual women’s experiences. The deliberate analytical choice in this book is therefore both political and methodological. First, it challenges the idea that only a famous person’s life is worth a book-length study or chapter, whereas ordinary woman who don’t have the resources to write and publish an autobiography can enter history only with a small reference or a quote, sometimes without a name or face, as mere collective data to prove a general point. Second, it enables an analysis that includes not only the social, cultural, and historical, but also the individual and narrative context in which a woman’s life is constructed, and in which an individual gender project is formulated and carried out. This book is able to explore the unique meaning and the process of the formulation of individual gender projects, well situated in each individual woman’s life span and narrative context. The attention to the narrative context also produces an analysis that engages not only the content but also the narrating act, structure, and language of the life narratives.
The four cases in this book obviously are not meant to be representative of all women occupying similar social locations. That said, their experiences are shaped by the broader social context and their locations and the structural conditions that are far from being unique to them. While attending to the singular and specific enabled my analysis of oppression as contextual and contingent and experienced in specific ways by each person in different moments, this book goes further to connect these experiences to the broader systems of domination and the ways power is systematically exercised. This is accomplished by an overview of the historical and social context in which the women live and a contextualized analysis of each woman’s experiences in relation to broader historical, social, and cultural conditions, as well as systems of inequality and difference. Recognizing the impact of social location and categories, the analysis takes advantage of their analytical benefits while avoiding reproducing and perpetuating their social construction by situating these women’s experiences within the context while disrupting existing categories and avoiding essentialization by presenting them as distinctive individuals, with each life-story a result of her own narrative agency. Through a contextual, intersectional, and anti-essentialist analysis, the study connects the analysis of the individual and the personal—the multiple dimensions of individual identity and the particular social position one occupies—to the structural and the political—the intersecting structure of domination and its manifestation in individual woman’s lives.
In feminist research, the issue of power relations throughout the research process is often raised. Whose voice is present in the writing? Who has the final say about what material makes it to print? Who controls the interpretation of the research materials? This book contains the information from the participant’s life narratives and my interpretation of them. For logistical and confidentiality reasons, I was not able to include the complete transcripts of the live story interviews that are analyzed herein. To situate the analysis in context, I provide a brief summary of the woman’s life at the beginning of each chapter. These summaries are my reconstruction of their life stories according to the information I selected from the interviews. The structure and the amount of detail of the life story and certain events, as reflected in the summary and later in my analysis, do not necessarily convey how they were organized and appeared in the participants’ original oral narratives. While I am responsible for the interpretations I present here, the voices of the participants (and at times from the rest of the participants) have made their way into this book in one way or another in various analytical contexts. The situation is even more complicated because the oral narrative has gone through various layers of interpretation in the process of transcription (oral to textual) and translation (Mandarin or other Chinese regional speech to English). In trying to preserve the nature of the participants’ speech, I retained some obvious grammatical inconsistencies in my transcription and translation, such as pronoun shifts and other rhetorical glitches.
I want to express my appreciation to the participants whose stories are not yet told here for their participation and support. The stories they generously shared with me enriched and deepened my understanding of the topic. Although their narratives are not directly included in this book due to its specific focus and limited space, they have contributed directly or indirectly to this work. The table in the appendix contains some basic information about all fifteen research participants.
I tried to write a paragraph of highlights or a summary of the life stories for the remainder of the participants, but decided against it because that would fail to do justice to the richness and uniqueness of each story. I am saving them for future writings. Recording and studying contemporary Chinese women’s life stories is an ongoing and long-term project in my research career. In 2010–11 in Chongqing, I recorded nine more life stories of women who lived through the Mao era, and I plan to record more in my future research projects. Although not presented in this book, the other life stories will find their ways into future research and writing about Chinese women’s lives in some way.