What is “Made-in-China Feminism(s)”? Gender Discontent and Class Friction in Postsocialist China

• In Event: 3131 - Intersectional Approaches to Citizenship and the State

Abstract

Urban China is witnessing perennial explosions of women’s outcries against the prevalent portrayals, expectations, and treatment of their gender. Ranging from street activism, media publications, to online protests and gripes, these expressions of female discontent are grouped together under the label of “Chinese feminism,” or explicitly adversely, “made-in-China feminism” by popular commentaries. Furthermore, academic literature also tends to presume a monolithic Chinese feminism (we use “C-fem” to refer to this purportedly homogenous entity). Assuming a state-society dichotomy, liberal observers treat C-fem as anti-regime activism, paying little attention to the substance of local gender contentions. Readily borrowing the critical framework tackling Western neoliberalism, the Chinese neo-left critics conflate C-fem and the post-second wave identity politics, which has unfolded in a thoroughly different political, cultural, and economic milieu. As a departure, this article investigates the actual practices and discourses of “C-fem” and the politics of its naming. First, our ethnography differentiates C-fem’s two latent strands, one conspicuous and one unheeded, that seek to empower women based on disparate views of heterosexual relationships. Second, through historiographical analysis, we demonstrate that they represent two routes women have taken as gender and class inequalities keep deteriorating. We argue that instead of signaling a neoliberal recuperation, the class articulation in urban Chinese women’s struggles is a perverse consequence of neoliberalization. Our analysis further identifies the making of the local feminist project that destabilizes the structural oppression distinct to postsocialist China. We conclude by assessing different intellectual approaches to studying local popular protests in the global South.

Authors

• Yige Dong, Johns Hopkins University

• Angela Xiao Wu, New York University