Body Utopia In An Age Of Consumption

"Body writing" was predicted as the future direction for ecriture feminine and feminine movement in 90's literary criticism. However, the appearance of so-called "beauty writer" in the late 90's indicates the danger of commercialization of feminine body writing, which falls a hedonist commodity for patriarchy society rather than, as it is always expected, constitutes a counteraction to patriarchy culture. This paper, after a contrastive study of body writing both home and abroad, argues that Chinese literary criticism in 90's, due to its indigenous experience and poetic tradition, misunderstood and distorted the writing theory of ecriture feminine, advanced by the feminism theorist, Helene Cixous. In western body writing theory, the appearance of female's body, instead of acting as the object of literary depiction, is a poetic textual practice driven by body impulse, a means to overthrow the Phalluscentrism, while in Chinese body writing, female body becomes object of the literary representation. That invites the danger of peeping driven by male's estrous desire and also takes the main responsibility for body writing falling prey to the commercialization in 90's. Furthermore, in respect of the nature of female's sensatory pleasure, in western literary theory it is assigned more culture implication and regarded as the symbol of female'sselflessness and fertility rather than pure physical pleasant sensation. In contrast, the depiction of this pleasant sensation by Chinese female writers indicates an inclination to narcissism and algolagnia which aggravate the segregation of the female from the society and the bereavement of female's subjectivity. Based on the reflection of literary criticism's definition of body writing in 90's, this paper holds that literary criticism in 90's ignored the Utopian tendency of western body writing theory, overstated the universal adaptability of this theory as a strategy to women emancipation, which obscured the truth of female writing's succumbing to consumption-driven culture. This paper explores thoroughly the predicament of body writing, reveals that the misunderstanding of 90's literary criticism is originated first from the deviation in the understanding of western feminine literary theory, and then related to the particular culture background of body worship among the 90's intellectuals.