Body,Space And Gender:a Survey In Arabic School For Muslim Women In Northwest China

Arabic schools for Muslim women were established by Hui people in China. They are often called "women school" for short. Women schools have drawn the attention of the public, researchers and scholars because of their closed spaces and covered bodies in them. Hui people relatively densely populate in northwest China, and women schools are typical in these areas, so they were selected as the target population of the survey.The survey was unfolded on the basis of Marxism practice theory. It aims to identify gender issues in women schools in the perspectives of "body" and "space". It is a challenging innovation because few people did.The research contents include:1. Approaching women schools, and introduction of my ethnographic fieldwork, experiences and reflection;2. Observing the spaces of and everyday life in women schools, analyzing how Muslim women produced different spaces including physical space, practice space and meaning-full space, etc. and how these spaces conformed their bodies;3. Researching in body value of Islam, describing how these values were observed in Muslim women schools, and telling different code meanings of body and body ritual in women schools;4. Exhibiting dress and adornments used by Muslim women in their school, telling different symbolic meanings of hijab, and analyzing how sexual power controlled the game playing between the covered bodies and naked bodies of women;5. Surveying the values of Muslim women to loving, marriage and family through analyzing semi-structured interview data from women schools, and identifying gender issues in private space and public space;6. Discussing gender issues of Muslim women at home and abroad, reviewing different approaches to Muslim women studying, and coming to a brief conclusion.Based on the approach to analyzing the relationship between gender and body and space, the research tried to identify gender issues in women schools, and wished to find a special culture of Muslim women in their schools. The final result is that Muslim women in women schools refused the identity of feminists; however, their efforts of building women’s subjectivism and gender awareness unconsciously demonstrated the goal of feminism. Searching a suitable approach for Muslim women studying, the researcher must surpass the limitations of western-centered feminism and Islamic feminism of fundamentalism. It is a quite challenging job, moreover, another intellectual innovation.