(iPoster) Revolutionary Women and Gendered Political Order in China

• In Event: Poster Session: Women, Gender, and Politics Research

Abstract

This paper offers a feminist intervention in the history of twentieth-century Chinese political thought. It examines the gendered foundations of modern Chinese political order through the writings of Ding Ling (1904–86). Drawing on her fiction, essays, and self-writing from the Republican and early PRC periods, I argue that revolutionary projects stabilized political authority not only through institutional arrangements but through the regulation of women’s bodies, sexuality, and narrative voice. Women’s participation in revolution—initially framed as emancipation during wartime mobilization—was later recast as a source of moral and symbolic disorder requiring discipline and silencing.

Focusing on When I Was in Xia Village (1941) and its retrospective censorship during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and drawing on feminist theories of abjection—particularly Julia Kristeva’s account of woman as both upholding and threatening symbolic order—this paper argues that the figure of the “revolutionary woman” exposes a core tension of revolutionary politics: women are mobilized as political agents yet scapegoated as threats to social and sexual order once regime legitimacy is secured. This gendered logic of sacrifice and erasure reveals how authoritarian consolidation renders feminist critique intelligible only insofar as it serves nationalist or developmentalist ends.

By foregrounding gender, sexuality, and self-writing as sites of political contestation, this paper contributes to feminist interventions in the history of modern political thought, showing how the figure of the “revolutionary woman” has been central to the conceptualization of political order, authority, and legitimacy in twentieth-century China.

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