Transforming the Iron Girl: A Difficult Passage to Post-Mao Womanhood in Modern China

• In Event: 3149 - Constructing Gender

Abstract

This paper asks to what degree political movements led by a patriarchal state could empower women and give rise to a new female subjectivity. Specifically, it focuses on how the top-down women’s liberation movement in high socialist China had shaped rural women’s subjectivity and how this subjectivity was transformed in post-Mao era. The paper tackles these questions by closely examining the life trajectories of young rural women who came of age during the post-Mao transition. The girlhood of these young women was best characterized by the Maoist ideological icon of “iron girl,” meaning that an iron girl had a strong man-like body to carry out tough manual labor and firm political loyalty to follow revolutionary ideology.

Using oral history, archival and ethnographic data, the paper shows that, first of all, in transition to her womanhood, an iron girl had to go through a process to re-feminize her body. With the loosening of ideological control, multiples powers—patriarchal family, cultural conventions in rural China, and the reformed state all contested to shape her post-socialist subject. Second, in a patriarchal and totalitarian state of the socialist China, women’s liberation was primarily framed as an issue of gender equality. The discourse of equality, however, overshadowed that of women’s self-determination, which then gave way to the persistence of the patriarchal power structure both within and beyond the family after the post-Mao transition. Finally, the top-down political movement to equalize gender relationship was not able to take roots in China’s rural society, partly because the ideology was mostly imposed on young women, and not localized to restructure institutions such as family and rural communities.

Author

• Pengfei Zhao, Indiana University