Engendering the modern: Configurations of femininity in Chinese literary culture, Late Qing-1940's

The intersection of gender and Chinese modernity is particularly striking as the most heated debates on gender and the new possibilities of and for women came at a time when intellectuals desperately searched for a solution to China's modern crises and attempted to define Chinese modernity. This, I will argue, is by no means coincidental. Why did women emerge as a topic of heated debate at the turn of 20th century China? How were these discourses on gender implicated with those of nation and Chinese modernity? As women and writing emerged as categories through which to define the modern, how was women's relationship to writing configured? How did women themselves participate in and envision the construction of Chinese modernity?; My dissertation will examine the various ways in which definitions of gender and modernity have been mutually implicated at specific historical junctures from the late Qing to the 1940's. The first part will explore the ways in which discursive definitions of gender and nation have been imbricated in the late Qing and May Fourth debates; the second part will explore the ways in which gender and consumerism have been intertwined in 1930's--1940's Shanghai popular culture. Specifically, I will examine the following issues: debates on women's schools and traditional "feminine" literary genres in the late Qing; women and new fiction in the May Fourth period; discursive figurations of femininity in popular pictorials in 1930's Shanghai; and women and popular culture in 1940's Shanghai. While women's liberation was promoted as a means to national salvation and as a symbol of Chinese modernity, new freedoms afforded to women continued to be curbed by new and old forms of containment. At the same time, however, these discourses and the gender reforms that resulted nonetheless opened new spaces and opportunities for women, which they sometimes used in new and unintended ways. Through examining the figures and works of Qiu Jin (1875--1907), Ling Shuhua (1900--1990), and Zhang Ailing (1920--1995), I will also show the different ways in which women participated in defining femininity and modernity discursively not only through their writings, but also through practice and "performance."...