Feminism and Global Chineseness: The Cultural Production of Cont ...

It is crucial because the act of reading actively and aggressively produces different and often times conflictary cultural and political meanings of the text and the author. To understand the controversies of women authors of color, we thus need to read and investigate those readings that construct the controversies.

Second, focusing on the various readings of controversial Chinese women authors, I deconstruct the notion of “representational inevitability,”⁴ a pervasive but seriously flawed reading practice that reduces creative texts to documents on the social, cultural, or political conditions of their specific racial or national communities, while serving as a discursive control of the West over the Third World, and of a masculinist nation over feminist desires.

The last step is to un-produce the controversies of women authors of color through a new feminist framework of reading beyond “representational inevitability.” On the one hand, women authors of color do not represent fixed national or racial conditions but produce part of the constantly changing realities. On the other, the controversies are not contradictions between women and the nation, but tensions between feminist and nationalist discourses, complicated by the rise of popular culture that turns everything into a commodity. Recognizing and resisting the cultural production of oversimplified and reductive notions of feminism, I argue that feminism must be envisioned from the outside, not of the nation but of masculinist nationalist discourses, in order to maintain its critical edge. It is of great necessity that feminist critics resist male-centered nationalist “unreal loyalties” such as patriotism⁵ and keep their independent position as “outsiders,” a notion much inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Outsiders’ society.”⁶

While women authors of color produce for their audiences one of the many realities of their culture and tradition, various critics continue that cultural production through their interpretations, producing meanings and images of women authors of color and the in / significance of the female body. Reading is thus political and practical. It is through reading that realities of gender, race, and nation are “coded,” to borrow the term from Stuart Hall, into being.⁷ It is also through reading that cultural and national traditions are produced, reproduced, contested, and revised.