Creating gender in the interregnum: Women's literature and social change in twentieth century China

When do social expectation and ruling ideology become a part of a society's "tradition"? When does a society have the freedom to look back on this tradition with a sense of irony? Using Antonio Gramsci's construction of "interregnum," a period where "the old is dying and the new cannot be born," this project addresses these questions through an examination of women's literature. In China's twentieth century, "woman" was used as a marker of the nation's wellness as well as an embodiment of social failures, by groups in power and those seeking it. But what of the women themselves? This dissertation examines how women writing under these changing icons benefitted from representation even as they were restricted by criterion for inclusion under these highly politicized articulations of their subjectivity. By juxtaposing women's narratives of interregnum from four periods: the May Fourth movement, the early years of socialism, the Cultural Revolution's aftermath, and Beijing hosting the 1995 UN World Conference on Women, I consider the significances and fragmentations of "woman" in each period. This consideration leads to an alternative history of the implications of gender, as well as a focused consideration of the subjective experience of social change.