Socialist Feminism in Postsocialist China

Spakowski, Nicola

doi:10.1215/10679847-7050478

Cited by 32 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Patricia Hill Collins (1986) stressed the importance of Afro-American women’s culture for black female intellectuals to produce black feminist thought and argued that personal and cultural biographies are significant sources of knowledge for ‘outsider within’ intellectuals. Nicola Spakowski’s (2018) study reveals that intellectual constitution is not only informed by cultural but also historical and political context. She notes that most of the actors involved in China’s postsocialist feminism were born before 1978 and have experienced socialism as part of their own biographies, which has influenced their intellectual reorientation and how concepts are negotiated, selected, and discarded.…”

Section: The Travelling Scholarmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In China, since the hybrid and heterogeneous construction of ideas on gender in today’s globalized world necessarily evokes a hybrid and diversified use of theories and concepts, the incorporation of non-Chinese feminist thoughts into Chinese feminist scholarship is also necessary. As Nicola Spakowski (2018) demonstrates, while having an acute awareness of unequal power relations between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ and being critical towards Western notions of feminism and gender as the main and universal category of analysis, postsocialist feminism in China also integrates Western left-wing feminism, Western scholarship on women under socialism. For example, inspired by Nancy Fraser’s discussion on the interconnection between feminism and neoliberal capitalism, Chinese feminists started to discuss the need to particularize and historicize gender in their reflection of both China’s socialist past and the reception of gender in postsocialist China (Spakowski, 2018).…”

Section: Hybrid Intellectual Biographymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Writing with an accent: Travelling scholars and xenophone scholarship

Huang

2023

European Journal of Women's Studies

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Feminists have been examining the travelling and dominance of Anglophone feminist knowledge across the globe through translation and adaptation, and their revision and transformation in the process. This article suggests that feminist scholarship circulates globally through not only the travelling of theories but also the ‘travelling’ scholars who move geographically, linguistically, and intellectually in and out of the Anglophone scholarly world. It considers knowledge production as an embodied process and explores the relationship between intellectual biography and knowledge production. Directing the gaze to travelling scholars and their ‘accented’ writings, it traces the various types of ‘accents’ in the form of italics or non-Romanized scripts, the invented terms and phases, the meaning frames and conceptual constructions, and creative grafting of ideas and epistemic frameworks. Using various forms of ‘accented’ writings in feminist and queer inquiries about China as examples, this article demonstrates that moving between languages and intellectual traditions, the accented writings produced by travelling scholars can serve as important modes and foci of feminist knowledge production and have the potential to produce ‘xenophone’ scholarship that contributes to feminist knowledge production.

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Section: The Travelling Scholarmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Hybrid Intellectual Biographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Writing with an accent: Travelling scholars and xenophone scholarship

Huang

2023

European Journal of Women's Studies

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“…On the one hand, this Chinese feminist tradition is clearly one in which women’s status is always considered in light of other issues and not for its own sake. On the other hand, however, the fact that gender is secondary in feminist movements is not necessarily a fundamental flaw, but may well be seen as constitutive of an alternative way of materializing gender equality to the extent that it fits the society’s specific condition (e.g., see Dong, 2008; Spakowski, 2018; Zhang, 2011). In terms of the one-child policy, it can be seen as one manifestation of the above-mentioned feminist tradition in which gender-related views are disrupted and women’s empowerment is promoted, either as a part, or as a consequence, of the country’s birth-control endeavor, and one in which the broader institutional environment surrounding gender equality will necessarily lag behind real-world developments because women’s welfare, per se, has not been specifically addressed.…”

Section: The One-child Policy the Accidental Empowerment Of Women And...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“As Good as a Boy” But Still a Girl: Gender Equity Within the Context of China’s One-Child Policy

Wang

Zhang

2022

Sage Open

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What would happen if gender inequality were suddenly and forcefully proclaimed to be non-existent by the authorities? The Chinese one-child policy has to some extent functioned as a unique social experiment to answer this question. Historically, sons have been preferred in China. Yet, with the restriction of one child per family, many people have been rendered sonless and forced to find solace in the well-known propaganda slogan: “Having a girl is as good as having a boy.” Delving into the life experiences of singleton daughters in urban China, this study reveals that, within nuclear families, daughters are in many ways treated as if they were sons, which demonstrates people’s potential to overcome previous gender discrimination when circumstances require. However, outside the realm of nuclear families, the treatment of daughters as akin to sons falters, dissolves, or backfires in various ways, revealing that true equality cannot be achieved without a radical confrontation and systematic adjustment of existing power relations. This study contributes to understanding gender equality in China while also serving to document lived experiences in relation to a unique policy that was recently abolished.

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“…In the face of dismantling many state socialist institutional mechanisms for addressing gender inequality, China's current generation of feminist activists (there are, of course, multiple feminisms in China; see, e.g., Spakowski [2018]) have adopted creative ways of making their voices heard (Zheng 2015). Most visibly, in the early 2010s, a group of young activists later identified as the 'Feminist Five' began organizing public protests and performance art to draw attention to domestic abuse and sexual harassment.…”

Section: Positioning Sexual Politics In China's Market Economymentioning

confidence: 99%

We, too: contending with the sexual politics of fieldwork in China

Schneider

Lord

Wilczak

2020

Gender, Place & Culture

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This paper contributes to a feminist politics of fieldwork by elevating narratives that have been pushed to the periphery of academic and methodological debates, particularly in China Studies. Inspired by feminist geographers' understandings of positionality, as well as the global #MeToo movement, we detail how China's current historical moment-when patriarchy, the market, and growing authoritarianism intersect to commodify bodies and quell dissent-shapes gendered and sexualized fieldwork relationships. Drawing on our own experiences, as well as interviews with other China Studies researchers, the paper engages specific sites where researchers' bodies are sexualized and sometimes threatened. This includes banquets, karaoke bars, and the virtual spaces of messaging platforms and social media. We explore methodological implications of such relationships and share strategies that researchers have adopted as they attempt to make grim tradeoffs between personal security and 'getting the data.' The paper calls for more frank discussions of the sexual politics of field-based research, particularly with early-career researchers, and for a valorization of less-than-heroic approaches to fieldwork.

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Socialist Feminism in Postsocialist China

Cited by 32 publications

References 31 publications

Writing with an accent: Travelling scholars and xenophone scholarship

Writing with an accent: Travelling scholars and xenophone scholarship

“As Good as a Boy” But Still a Girl: Gender Equity Within the Context of China’s One-Child Policy

We, too: contending with the sexual politics of fieldwork in China

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