Panel 17: Writing About and With Chinese Women

Chair: Cara Wallis, University of Michigan

This panel centers around the figure of Chinese women as a locus of lived experience and knowledge and as agential subjects of representation. The papers in this panel write against the discourse of a minoritized suffering subject that relegates women’s experiences to “women’s issues,” or victimization of capital or the state. In engaging with issues of representing “the other,” we inquire into how and to what ends we write with those women who inform our thinking. Recent literature has explored various modes of being and becoming women in late-socialist China increasingly marked by capitalistic relations. In this panel, we seek a deeper understanding of the constraints and affordances of such writing projects and ask questions such as: What is the analytical edge of Chinese women in understanding contemporary Chinese society? How does research on Chinese women’s experiences continue to inform scholarly discussion on topics such as power, resistance, and agency? How can overseas Chinese women forge ethical and reciprocal relationships with women interlocutors in our research?

Panelists

Angelina Yajie Chen, Indiana University Bloomington, “Listening as Feminist Method: Ethics of Care in a Migrant Women’s Hub in South China”

How do migrant women organize and care for each other in South China’s factory hubs? The institutionalization of population control - the hukou system – has long barred rural migrants from employment security and health benefits, essentially conditions to socially reproduce, in the cities. That said, migrant workers in South China, especially women, have long found ways to sustain each other in urban villages near industrial parks. The paper analyzes how migrant women reimagine and navigate systems of care in the face of precarious employment, childcare responsibilities, and an intensified population management regime. Drawing from my ethnographic research in an urban village in Shenzhen in summer 2023 and community engagements since 2019, I explore how migrant women find expressions for themselves and negotiate cross-class alliances to preserve social relationships and communal care spaces. Lastly, the paper reflects on the ethics of care, both within the self-organized migrant women community and for the Chinese woman ethnographer doing research “at home.” Attentive to the potential conflicts and tensions in reciprocal care, I argue that listening, alongside narration, is an essential feminist tool in both organizing and community-based research.

Yun Feng, University of Minnesota, “Homebound Women in Rural E-commerce: Self-Formation between Patriarchal Family and Digital Empowerment in Rural China”

This article focuses on women’s paradoxical entanglement with patriarchal families in the digitization of Chinese rural villages. As early as 2008, women became the pioneers and pivotal roles of rural e-commerce, promoting the sprouts of digital capitalism in rural China. However, as the local e-commerce industry progressed, the gendered division of labor and space within households increased domestic confinement, keeping women away from the benefits of their e-commerce endeavors. While platform economy improved women’s economic status in e-commerce villages, entrepreneurship based on family collaboration, patriarchal industrial clusters and business networks, and male-centric land distribution further entrenches women in home confinement. In between existing social structure and the emerging digital economy, women dynamically navigate gender subject, clan subject, economic subject, and digital subject to leverage each other in order to craft their affects, rules of living, and self-knowledge into a pleasing life story.

Daniela Licandro, University of Milan, “Women, Violence, and Agency: The Battered Woman in Zhang Tianyi’s Like Snow Like Mountain”

Along with sexual harassment, domestic violence has occupied a preeminent position in contemporary Chinese feminist discourses and activism. How has literature responded to the widely felt urgency to expose that which has systematically been concealed, neglected or naturalized? Zhang Tianyi’s 张天翼short story collection Like Snow Like Mountain (Ru xue ru shan 如雪如山, 2022) stands out in the contemporary literary landscape for encouraging a critical reflection on women’s embodied experiences of pain, gender violence, and the relation between women, violence, and agency in post-socialist, neoliberal China. Drawing upon feminist approaches (Burke 2019; Fraser 2009), gender and queer theories (Fahs 2016; bell hooks 1997), and literary studies (Xiao 2022), this paper examines the figure of the battered woman in two of Zhang’s stories as a revealing detail that situates domestic violence at the intersection of various forms of inequality and injustice. By tying domestic violence to larger patterns of marginalization, colonization, and socio-economic unevenness, Zhang’s fiction, I argue, undercuts binary constructions of public and private, victim and perpetrator, as well as passivity and agency. While enabling a critique of multiple, intersecting systems of oppression that are temporally woven in the female body-subject, Zhang’s stories shed light upon the strategies that women employ to carve out a space of self-determination and agency from within the system that oppresses them.