Her Life in Her Own Words: Discovering Alternative Voices in Chinese Women’s Writing

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Literary composition has always been a male-dominated enterprise in China. Male writers, through their persona compositions in women’s voice, established literary conventions about feminine identity, sentiments and voice. When women assume the authorial role, they had to confront these male-constructed literary conventions and create their own literary voices. How do they develop a female subjectivity and female identity against cultural expectations and stereotypes? What happens when women’s life experience and lyric sentiments went beyond the conventional, male carved “feminine” language allows them to express? This panel explores different/alternative voices in women’s writing and shows how women writers contest established gender roles and feminine voices through literary representation. Qiulei Hu’s paper reveals female voices different from the “boudoir resentment” in elite women’s poetry of the early medieval period and inspects the causes of their eventual suppression in textual transmission; Through studying late Ming and Qing women’s travel writing, Shiling Yu shows how women venture out of the inner space and write about experience that is traditionally considered a male privilege; Chengjuan Sun’s paper looks at Qing dynasty gentry women’s playful verses and argues that they represent women writers’ attempt to defy traditional gender roles in literature; Da Zheng examines a twentieth century woman writer’s autobiography that showcases how literary writing helped a woman come to terms with her diasporic experience and female identity. Together, four papers of this panel demonstrate women writers’ efforts in defining their literary identity and voices through negotiating with cultural and literary traditions about gender roles and female experience.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Qiulei Hu, Whitman College

Chair

• Jen-der Lee, Academia Sinica

Individual Presentations

• What Women Write?: Neglected Female Voices in Early Medieval Chinese Poetry - Qiulei Hu, Whitman College

• Geographic Travel, Literary Travel and Worldly Travel: Women’s travel writing from Late Ming to 1840 - Shiling Yu, Nanjing University

• Engendering Humor: Women’s Playful Verses - Chengjuan Sun, Kenyon College

• Chinese Housewife and Women’s Autobiography - Da Zheng, Suffolk University

Discussant

• Nanxiu Qian, Rice University