Foreword
What has made controversial women controversial? Are they controversial because they deal with audacious topics—sex, desire, politics—that traditional Chinese women were never allowed to write about? Or is it because the politics of cultural and literary criticism have produced such controversy? How should we examine the conflicted relationship between feminism and nationalism? What does women’s writing have to do with gender, race, and ethnicity? What is the relationship between gender and geopolitical space? In this book Feminism and Global Chineseness: The Cultural Production of Controversial Women Authors, Dr. Zhu offers several test cases through which we can study these very questions.
This book is a reflection on criticism, especially feminist criticism, in different geopolitical spaces. By choosing four controversial women writers—Wei Hui, Li Ang, Li Bihua, and Maxine Hong Kingston— whose writings are connected with four different geopolitical spaces, Dr. Zhu examines how the controversy between women and nation / community is produced and what kind of politics and discursive struggles are hidden behind such controversy.