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

In her introduction, she astutely points out, “There have never been ‘pure’ national cultural realities: they have always been ‘coded,’ ‘edited,’ and mediated while constantly being produced, reproduced, revised, and transformed by writers, critics, and the general public.” It is precisely because of such “impure” national cultural realities that the subject of feminism is often misunderstood, oppressed, and distorted. Therefore, this book serves to “un-produce” the controversy of these female writers, is also an attempt to dispel the confusion surrounding the question of women’s place in society.

Although writing from different regions, these four women writers all choose to narrate the female body, which has become an ambivalent site for the power struggles between feminism and nationalism and between women’s desire and global consumerism. In the case of Wei Hui’s representation of women’s bodies, the controversy is mainly about the participation of women in the consumption of culture against the background of post-colonial Shanghai. As the representative of “beauty writers [meinu zuojia]” and the New-New-Generation [xinxin renlei], Wei Hui’s writing has dubious meanings. One may wonder: Does her writing betray feminism by downgrading women’s bodies to part of a materialistic consumer culture? Does she forsake Chinese nationalism by surrendering to the Western Phallus? Or on the contrary, has she successfully battled to redefine a new-generation female writer’s sexuality and subjectivity? Through Dr. Zhu’s careful reading, we can see the “inadequacies” of a contemporary Chinese feminist criticism, that neglects the complexities of women’s desire in the context of global capitalism and reinforces the patriarchal nationalist construct of China. The similar “inadequacies” of feminist criticism also run through the other three controversial cases. The Maxine Hong Kingston controversy is essentially about a female body in which gender and race contradict each other. Is Kingston a feminist champion who exposes a silencing sexism in Chinese American culture? Or is she a racial traitor who caters to White-centered American readers? Dr. Zhu’s study of the Kingston controversy not only reveals the theoretical tension between feminism and cultural nationalism, but also challenges the so-called “authentic Chinese American reality.” Like Wei Hui and Maxine Hong Kingston, Li Ang also participates in the production and reproduction of her own controversy.