A revolutionary women's culture: Rewriting femininity and women's experience in China, 1926--1949

This dissertation investigates the question of gender in the Chinese leftist political and cultural movements of the late 1920s to 1940s. I challenge the dominant interpretation that the politicization of the arts, and the privileging of political and class solidarity that marked this formative period of the Chinese Communist revolution led to the suppression of both femininity and female subjectivity under a masculine sign. First, I examine a range of literary works by leftist women activists and writers, to reveal the multiple meanings of not only political and class solidarity, but also of "revolution" itself, and how these identifications were expressed in relation to women's gendered consciousness. I show how leftist women writers narrated women's participation in new forms of public political expression, collective identification, and labor as means of discovery and re-cognition of the gendered self within the social. Second, I focus on the emergent genres of "revolutionary literature" emphasizing the role of art in reflecting reality and enacting social transformation that flourished in international leftist cultures, including in China, during this period. I argue that these forms, characterized by a documentary aesthetic and an emphasis on social experience, allowed women to challenge the dominant association of women's literary expression with narratives of private, sentimental or sexual experience. Furthermore, by tapping into the enduring expectation that women write as women, these politically activist narratives expanded the conceptions of femininity and "women's experience" in the popular imagination at large. Indeed, I consider the urban cultural arena in which stories of revolutionary women and genres revolutionary literature circulated together, especially through the media of left-affiliated women's journals and publishing houses in Shanghai. By bringing these investigations together, my dissertation sheds new light on women's actual and symbolic roles in a polyvalent and widely-appropriated leftist cultural and political imaginary during the formative decades of the Chinese revolution. The interventions by Chinese leftist women writers into the question of the intersections between gendered, political and classed subjectivities were the foundations of a "revolutionary women's culture," which, I suggest, had lasting effects on the meanings of socialist femininity in Communist China.