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

As a result, Third World women often find themselves stuck in unproductive and negative cultural debates. While I welcome the critical energy stemming from literary and cultural debates, I also see the danger of this seemingly endless attacks and defenses between feminists and (cultural) nationalists, who are more interested in accu­sation than solutions, and who do so without even questioning the legi­timacy of the debate. It seems that critics have taken for granted a conflicted relationship between women and the nation / community when the contradiction is actually between feminism and (cultural) nationalism. As a result, the controversy continues with its ownfeedback loop, and we lose sight of our ultimate goal to transform the overarching hierarchical systems of power—particularly gender, race, and ethnicity—from which the issues first arose.

The controversy of Third World women authors, especially the contradiction between women and nation / community, is culturally and historically produced, as much by their works, as by literary and cultural criticism of limited theoretical paradigms. This controversy almost always goes hand in hand with the cultural production of reductive and distorted notions of feminism. This study will un-produce the controversy through an alternative feminist framework of criticism beyond current theoretical entrapments. Focusing on four controversial contemporary women authors located in different Chinese geopolitical spaces, this book emphasizes a politics of literary criticism, which is essential to the making of textual and cultural meanings. This not only provides a different feminist production of the texts by women authors of color, but it also engages in the cultural production of feminist discourses. It brings attention to the often neglected negative representation of feminism in contemporary culture and revises the feminist project in such a way so that it detangles feminist critics from the theoretically produced dilemmas.

First, I define a politics of literary and cultural criticism, draw­ing upon Stanley Fish’s idea of “interpretive strategy,”¹ Patrocinio Schweickart’s “feminist theory of reading,”² and above all Stuart Hall’s famous concept of cultural “encoding / decoding.”³ In other words, reading is crucial not because it helps us to understand an author’s intended meaning.