Organizer: Joan Judge, Kyoto University
Chair and Discussant: Mary B. Rankin, Independent Scholar
This interdisciplinary panel emerges out of a conference held at UCLA in March of 1996 on "Readership, Authorship, and Publishing in the Late Qing" and focuses on one of that conference's themes: new print forms and the "new woman." The four papers are based on readings of a variety of new "texts," many of which have been unstudied to date, including women's textbooks, New Novels and poems, newspapers and magazines targeting a female audience, and materials concerning the education of courtesans.
In examining these texts, the panelists share two main objectives. The first is to analyze the tension between the old and the new in print-mediated representations of women in this period. While some texts perpetuated long-standing normative views of women's roles, others radically broke with the past by both including women in and using them as metonyms for the reformist nationalist project. This panel will, however, attempt to go beyond objective depictions of the new woman's instrumentalist role in national strengthening. Its second objective is, therefore, to explore the emergence of new female subjectivities in the late Qing through the formation of interpretive communities of women readers, students, prostitutes, and poets. Examining how the courtesan's "sentimental education" was experienced and represented, how women readers integrated fiction into their own lives and responded to it in their own poetry, how female students struggled with useful knowledge versus moral knowledge, and how women reencountered their bodies through pictorial images, we will begin to understand how "the new women" negotiated identities for themselves in early twentieth-century China.
Citizens or Mothers of Citizens? Reimagining Femininity in Late Qing Women's
Textbooks
Joan Judge, Kyoto University
This paper examines the role new textbooks played in refiguring the place of women in late Qing society. Its approach is three-tiered and its sources include a variety of texts-most of which have been unstudied to date-from ethics textbooks for elementary school students to readers created for women over twenty years of age.
The first tier of the analysis investigates the production of these textbooks as objects-their places of publication and sources of translation (where relevant), their layout and use of illustrations-in order to determine the unique ways of framing textbooks designed for a female audience. The second tier examines the text as meaning and closely analyzes the language used in the materials-new terms, appropriated tropes-and the key ideas they put forward. Emphasis is on the tensions within and among these texts as bearers of images of the "new woman": while some continued to promote distinct educational trajectories for men and women and advocate subordinate or supportive female roles, others asserted that women were key players in the project of national strengthening. Ultimately, the third level of analysis will link this tension-ridden conceptual world of the text to the historical actors who brought these texts their meaning. Newspapers and educational journals of the period, letters, and memoir literature will serve as various entry points into the communities of women who were the teachers, readers, students, interpreters, and consumers of the new textbooks.
Schooling the New Woman in the Late Qing: The Novel Approach
Ying Hu, University of California, Irvine
The central question this paper addresses is the double-bind of the late Qing ideology of literacy for women: the possibility of inclusion for women in the nationalist reform program, and its accompanying new normative restrictions on what constitutes the New Woman. More specifically, it investigates the uses of the New Novel which was believed to be a "textbook" particularly suited to the female readership.
The paper analyzes two novels with particular attention to how women readers are addressed and figured. In Huang Xiuqiu (1905), a novel that specifically addresses the issue of women's education, the pedagogical authority of the reformist figure as well as that of the western Enlightenment figure are explored and contested. In the novel Dongou nühaojie (1902), the narrative provides the nodal point in a web of poetry-writing women inside and outside the narrative text, thereby facilitating the formation of a textually-based interpretive community of female readers.
Both texts demonstrate that the woman readers addressed and projected are far from the passive, waiting-to-be-enlightened semi-literate figure projected by Liang Qichao. Rather than women being transformed from a state of "nomads and barbarians" to that of enlightened "mothers of citizens" (Liang), the transformation happens on the level of reformist ideology itself-it is transformed through the narrative representation of women's literacy, and it is transformed through the negotiations these readers maneuver, vis-à-vis existing women's tradition, vis-à-vis the reformists, and vis-à-vis western revolutionary and enlightenment figures.
Circumscribing the Reader: Depiction and Prescription of a "New" Female
Audience in Late Qing Newspapers and Magazines
Barbara Mittler, University of Heidelberg
This paper studies the depiction of women and women readers in late Qing women's magazines, pictorials, and daily newspapers and attempts to find evidence for the modernizing potential of these alien media in Chinese society: Do they envisage and create a new woman?
Investigating portrayals of weak or beautiful, self-assertive or motherly women, the paper asks whether such media really opened up new avenues for women, or whether they simply perpetuated long-standing views and prejudices. Tracing the establishment of women as implied readers, the paper asks to what extent the alien media may have served as encapsulated textbooks for women and what the nature and the aims of these textbooks were. The paper will thus uncover the hidden agenda behind the incorporation of women in newspapers and magazines not only as objects to be talked about but as subjects to be talked to.
The paper will argue that the inclusion of women in the newspaper text served certain ideological purposes: while certain female characteristics were promoted, the role of (male) authors and readers of newspapers was re-evaluated: to read and talk about women was to be a patriotic, fashionable, modern "new man." The "new woman," however, created on the pages of the alien medium, was much more ambiguous.
"But I Never Learned To Waltz": The Real and Imagined Education of
Courtesans in the Late Qing
Paola Zamperini, University of California, Berkeley
The aim of this paper is to illustrate how different texts disseminated and informed diverse ideas and images about the upbringing and the education of courtesans in the late Qing period.
How were these representations originally constructed? How did the presence of the West create new models for the upbringing of the courtesan? When the courtesan stepped in to make her voice heard, to what extent are we hearing her "real" voice and to what extent is her voice echoing the stereotypes of the past? To address these issues, I have chosen to focus on the education of one of the most famous courtesans of the period, Sai Jinhua as we find it in novels written by male authors at the turn of the century, especially Zeng Pu's Niehaihua, and in Sai Jinhua benshi, the interview that Liu Bannong conducted in her old age.
By comparing the real and the imagined Sai Jinhuas, I hope to show, on the one hand, how Chinese authors appropriated the long-standing cliché of the courtesan to introduce new possibilities for women's education and subjectivity. On the other hand, thanks to the explosive development of print culture in the late Qing, the courtesan herself, in a text like Sai Jinhua benshi, could step in to challenge those same images in her own life and education. The education of the courtesan as documented in these late Qing sources can then become symbolic of the negotiations that women, as subjects and objects of representation, were required to engage in as they emerged in the public arena.