Organizer: Qingyun Wu, California State University
Chair: Tani Barlow, University of Washington
Discussants: Paul S. Ropp, Clark University; David Roslton, University of Michigan
Although the study of women and women's writings, especially poetry, in the Qing dynasty has aroused much scholarly attention, feminist utopian desires and representation remain an insufficiently researched subject. If there is such a discourse in Chinese literary tradition, undoubtedly it has its strongest expression in Qing vernacular literature. This panel explores the multifarious features of feminist utopian discourse in women's tanci fiction, caizi jiaren romances, and mainstream novels of exotic worlds. Qingyun Wu's paper discusses three major strategies of feminist utopian discourse in women's tanci. She examines how women of the inner chamber use transvestism to project their masculine dreams in the outside world, how they express their desire for love or friendship that can transcend gender and sexual differences through imagined lesbian marriage, and how they visualize a utopian polygamy to overcome the female phobia for losing sisterhood after marriage. Zuoya Cao's paper examines how caizi jiaren writers have revised the concepts of caizi and jiaren and, through an idealized matching of beauty, intellect, and moral integrity between man and woman, disseminated a more democratic and humanistic idea towards love and marriage. Hsin sheng C. Kao's paper uses Derrida's deconstruction theory to decode the texts of Lü Xiong's Nüxian waishi and Li Ruzhen's Jinghua yuan. It explicates how the two male writers challenge a phallocentric Confucian ideology to empower women as well as produce a narrative discourse that is disruptive and non-hierarchical. The three papers collaborate closely to provide insights and raise new questions in our study of Qing vernacular literature.
Qingyun Wu, California State University
Tanci fiction has been recognized as the most significant literary achievement by women in the Qing Dynasty. By examining over twenty tanci tales by women, this paper discusses three features of their feminist utopian discourse: transvestism, lesbian desire, and utopian polygamy. Although transvestism appears in 47 out of 200 tanci tales recorded by Tan Zhengbi, it reveals a feminist intention only in women's tanci. The paper analyzes how transvestism in women's tanci differs from that in men's tanci, why female transvestism (nü ban nan zhuang) is elaborate and purposeful while male transvestism (nan ban nü zhuang) is exigent and insignificant, and how female transvestism gives wings to the imagination of those women writers confined in the inner chambers, for them to dream the impossible and question gender and sexual inequalities.
The paper also explores the motive and subconsciousness of lesbian desire in woman's tanci. It discusses why they not only imagine the possibility of a woman marrying a woman, but also, through examples such as a female couple retreating to deep mountains to live happily ever after, affirm a type of love purer and more sincere than normal marital love. It argues that Cheng Huiying's tanci of male homosexual love also disguises a lesbian desire-the desire for love or friendship that can transcend gender and sexual differences.
Most women tanci writers have been criticized for supporting feudal polygamy. But this paper demonstrates that polygamy in most women's tanci has been revised into a utopian type of polygamy. In their polygamous system, women are the center. Either through a woman, disguised as a man, marrying women or by other female initiation, a group of sisters string together, and finally get married to one man, usually feminized. This feminist scheme is most clear in Jifang yuan written by a peasant woman, who imagines twelve girls of tough experiences get married to one man and happily settle down in Jifang Yuan-the Garden of Eves one may say. This fantasized utopian polygamy helps overcome the female phobia, as revealed in Wunü yuan, for losing sisterhood after marriage.
Zuoya Cao, The American University
Between Jin Ping Mei and Hongloumeng, a large amount of popular novels known as "Caizi Jiaren" fiction were produced. Caizi Jiaren fiction has been historically disparaged for its formulaic plots and non individualized characterization. This paper argues that Caizi Jiaren fiction is actually a different genre one may call melodrama, which uses dramatic plots and archetypal strip characters to create a fantasized world for disseminating ideas. While Jin Ping Mei's and Hongloumeng's expose of real society blends with tragic nihilism, the heightened dream world of caizi jiaren articulates an optimistic hope for social change and better individual existence at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty.
Caizi Jiaren novels are romances of idealized love and marriage. Taking its three germinal texts-Ping Shan Leng Yan, Yu Jiao Li, and Haoqiu Zhuan-as example, the paper examines the two typical themes of Caizi Jiaren novels. First, personal choice in love is advocated or opposed to the tradition of arranged marriage. Two, the Emperor, appearing as an abstraction or fantasy figure, interferes to legalize the illicit union. Through analysis, the paper points out that utopian fantasies in those novels help set up a new democratic criteria in intellect as well as in love, and change the old concepts of caizi and jiaren. In essence, idealized caizi and jiaren are paragons of beauty, talent, and moral integrity, who are divorced from the ugliness, ignorance, and commercial vanity of their time. Talent is no longer a mere ornament or modification to woman's appearance; instead it becomes an integrated part of the concept of beauty, thus becoming the essential value of a woman. The acceptance of this type of jiaren as noble and virtuous automatically helps cultivate an unconventional judgment on the part of the reader. Although the stereotyped happy ending, with the success of caizi at the imperial examinations and the corresponding marital elevation of jiaren, shows the limits of utopian vision of those Caizi Jiaren writers, this vision however is still more heartening than an escape to Buddhism, Taoism, or a fantastic nowhere.
Today we may still regard Caizi Jiaren fiction as a type of utopian romance in the same way we are still longing and searching for an ideal match between man and woman. In the Qing dynasty, a man inspired by the Caizi Jiaren fantasies actually went to ask the emperor's support for an ideal marriage and was sentenced to lifelong exile and slavery-an interesting illustration of the impact of the Caizi Jiaren genre.
Hsin sheng C. Kao, California State University, Long Beach
Lü Xiong's Nüxian waishi (1711) and Li Ruzhen's Jinghua yuan (1830) are exceptional in classical Chinese literature for their mythical creation of powerful women who are able to challenge the patrilineal, patriarchal, and patrilocal order in fantasized utopian worlds. This paper is aimed to explore four specific issues concerning the resistance to and the defiance against a phallocentric Chinese Confucian ideology in these two texts. First, it examines how the two male writers of the Qing Dynasty employ the subtleties of binary oppositions such as man/woman, male/female, masculine/feminine, patriarch/matriarch, inside/outside to empower women as well as to produce a narrative discourse that is playful, disruptive, and non hierarchical. It then analyzes how the attribution of traits to gender makes easier the appropriation of narration for political means. Certain gender identified constructions (e.g. super female personae) can be seen as fictions of an era, shrewd political gestures in which marginalized narrative forms and plot could be accepted.
Under Manchuria domination, Lü and Li have recourse to be culturally coded as "feminine" in their search for an escape from a logocentric and phallocentric discourse, to escape from the deep seated polarization of Chinese Confucian thought itself. The reader thus notices the writers' bold interpretations-be in a supernatural sitting or a remote dreamland located overseas-in which the hierarchies are revered to dismantle established hierarchical structure. That is, in a Derridian deconstruction term, these male writers work through an interplay between gender presence and absence, as well as through the endless deferral of meaning.
As Derrida has stated in reference to the idea that writing can be a "totality" whose "implications concern the entirety of our culture directly or indirectly," this paper finally demonstrates how Lü and Li's various embattlement emerges from the contours of their respective texts to reveal their perceptions of the triad of man, woman, and patriarchy.
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