Bringing together the work of distinguished China historians, anthropologists, and literary and film scholars, Gender in Motion raises provocative questions about the diversity of gender practices during the late imperial society and the persistence and transformation of older gender ideologies under the conditions of modernity in China. While several studies have investigated gender or labor in late imperial and twentieth century China, this book brings these two concepts together, asking how these two categories interacted and produced new social practices and theories. Individual chapters...

Analyzing the protracted cultural debate in modern China over what and how women should write, this book focuses on two concepts of great importance in Chinese literary modernization--the new, liberated woman and the new, autonomous writing. Throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties, women's moral virtue, or de, developed as a physical ordeal that meant sacrifices in the areas of freedom of movement (seclusion in either the father's or husband's house) and the body (chastity, fidelity, widow suicide). While physical concepts of virtue existed for men, they were not canonized nearly as...

When Freudian sexual theory hit China in the early 20th century, it ran up against competing models of the mind from both Chinese tradition and the new revolutionary culture. Chinese theorists of the mind--both traditional intellectuals and revolutionary psychologists-- steadily put forward the anti-Freud: a mind shaped not by deep interiority that must be excavated by professionals, but shaped instead by social and cultural interactions. Chinese novelists and film directors understood this focus and its relationship to Mao's revolutionary ethos, and much of the literature of...

Examines the contradictory forms of authority at work in the autobiographical texts of modern Chinese writers and scholars and the way these conflicts helped to shape and determine the manner in which writers viewed themselves, their texts, and their work.