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

I first deconstruct the media production of The Beigang Incense Burner incident as “a war between two women” for the love of one man, which reduces Li Ang’s text to roman à clef concerning whether she represents or misrepresents the truth of the female representative involved. I consider Li Ang’s insider / outsider position a perfect example of feminist negotiation between nation and nationalism. She identifies with Taiwan, an insider, but is critical of the oppositional and almost mainstream Taiwanese nationalism. She breaks down the rigid boundaries between the progressive Taiwanese and reactive Mainlander and deliberately sexualizes nationalist politics with three narratives of the female body: the Grieving Mother of the Nation, the Lustful Widow, and the Unrestrained Woman.

Chapter 4 discusses the popularity of Li Bihua, a Hong Kong popular novelist, columnist, and film / TV screenwriter. Exploring such serious issues as national identity, gender, and sexuality in rather conventional love / romance plots, she is popular among both the general public and literary and cultural critics. Li Bihua is symbolic of Hong Kong, transformed from a cultural desert to a legitimate unique popular culture that embraces flexibility and resists rigid notion of nationalism. The controversy of Li Bihua is closely related to the delineation of Hong Kong literature, namely whether it should include the popular. Li Bihua is a pioneer in constructing a literary Hong Kong consciousness, but I argue that she is also critical of Hong Kong as an alternative space. The contradiction of her female characters, strong and conventional, is her way to imagine outside China-centered or Hong Kong nationalist discourses. It is in the conventional love / romance that nationalist boundaries are transgressed, and individuality is acknowledged.

This study is a result of my firm belief that feminist knowledge production is a form of activism. It is my personal negotiation of my own in-betweenness, and it is also my intervention as an overseas Chinese feminist in the cultural production of the nation and women authors. It is my subjective production of differently located Chinese feminisms and nationalisms in the hope to accentuate the flexibility of both terms and to illuminate the critical development of feminist criticism.