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

This book investigates the cultural production of four contemporary controversial women authors in different global Chinese locations, namely Maxine Hong Kingston of Chinese America, Wei Hui of Mainland China, Li Ang of Taiwan, and Li Bihua of Hong Kong, all of whom seem to be caught in the discursive power struggle between feminism, nationalism, and the increasingly powerful global popular consumerism. Focusing on the bodies of both women and texts by women, this book emphasizes the political significance of literary and cultural criticism while examining the specific historical and social contexts in which different discourses of feminism, nationalism and consumerism negotiate, cooperate, or confront with each other in their competition for the power to define and control cultural meanings of the female body and feminine / feminist texts.

It is my argument that the controversy of contemporary women authors of different Chinese locations is discursively produced by literary and cultural criticism of limited theoretical frameworks and that the making of the controversy is closely related to some essentialized reductive notions of feminism, nationalism, and consumerism in these geopolitical spaces. My study serves to un-produce the controversy with an alternative feminist framework of criticism that accentuates the flexibility and open-endedness of these crucial terms while contextualizing not only the primary texts by these women authors but also secondary texts by literary and cultural critics of various theoretical backgrounds. In the deconstructing process of the controversy is my participation, as a feminist critic, in the cultural production of Chineseness as well as Chinese feminist discourses, both globally and locally. Neither exhaustive nor conclusive, this study will be one of the different voices in the dialogues that shape the ways we read.

The definition of Chineseness has been a controversy in itself, “a theoretical problem” according to Rey Chow.² For Chow, “Chineseness,” the term that signifies ethnicity, is often confused with literary values of Chinese literature. On the other hand, the mapping of Chineseness is no less controversial as a result of historical territorial fragmentations, current political instabilities and traditional Sinocentric cultural orientation.