Varieties of Feminisms in China: Local Reception and Reinvention of Liberal Feminism in Ford Foundation Projects

• In Event: 3145 - Positionality and the Construction of Feminist Theory

Abstract

Based on interviews and documents from four Ford Foundation projects, this article explores how liberal feminism has been received and hybridized with local feminisms in post-socialist China. Results show how local actors appropriated elements from three strands of feminism: liberal, socialist and cultural. Conflicts among them were reconciled by deemphasizing the structural origins of gender inequality and putting impetus for change on individual women. The human rights-based understandings of gender equality that dominate world society discourse are thereby converted into women’s obligation to improve their “quality” and exercise their legal rights. This ignores and reproduces intersectional disadvantages of rural women.

Author

• Rujun Yang, University of California, Santa Barbara