Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018. xxvi, 278 pp. (Tables, coloured photos, illustrations.) US$90.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4384-7061-0.
This empirically rich work sheds light on multiple gender discourses that shape the individual gender projects of Chinese women today. It transcends ahistorical periodizations in which “post-Mao China” somehow makes a clean break with the Maoist past. Thus, ideal female gender models in post-Mao China—urban, feminine and sexualized nüxing—actually precede Mao during the May Fourth era; re-emergent after Mao, they did not replace funü, the ideal Maoist gender model. Huang stresses the positive legacies of Mao’s gender discourse and policy for women’s gender projects post-Mao: that period had promoted and elevated women’s role in the public and political spheres, albeit less than officially claimed.
This book rests on fifteen stories that Huang collected in 2006–2007. Four form its chapters. Although these stories are not technically representative, Huang’s contextualizations shed light on many issues facing Chinese women: gender and class, fashion and shame, gender desire and art work, and transnational encounters.
Huang treats gender as a project, not as social fact. No gender discourse is complete and coherent in any period. After Mao, multiple gender discourses circulate, and “new possibilities emerge from the conflicts and gaps between multiple discourses and languages about gender, class, and other categories of difference…” (24). The telling and retelling “challenge the master scripts [i.e., in the telling] and find the woman-centred and woman-defined discourse [i.e., in the retelling that Huang’s open-ended questions prompt]” (30).
Chapter 1 introduces an urban woman, born in 1956 and raised in an elite urban family in Beijing. Lin’s “telling’ reveals the invisibility of the social reproductive labor of her maternal grandmother, like many others of the time a jiatingfunü (housewife). In Maoist gender discourse, such women contrasted unfavorably with funü: backward and feudal, compared to those young, liberated women building socialism. Huang counters: “jiatingfunü enabled those funü to become liberated women subjects.”
Lin’s telling emphasizes class identity, while the retelling led her to a gender-centered account centred on bodily transformation. Lin’s personal gender project draws on the gender models of her grandmother, to whom she felt the closest, and those of her mother, whom she admires.
Chapter 2 highlights China’s rural-urban divide and the discrimination against rural migrants in the labor market, welfare, housing and education, as well as their social stigmatization. Dong’s story about shame, desire, dress and fashion speaks loudly to the latter, even for her, the supervisor of a restaurant. She was ashamed of being categorized as an outdated Maoist funü: wearing People’s Liberation Army sneakers made her a “nonwoman” or “failed woman.” However, more fashionable clothes did not end her sense of not “measuring up” (101). Her Sichuan-accented Mandarin linked her to one of China’s most stigmatized, migrant-sending provinces. However, in her telling and retelling, the Sichuan dialect provided “narrative agency,” “a means for her to convey both desire and shame, revealing the exercise of personal agency in constructing her own gender project, one that follows and resists the new model” (119). Still, Dong’s individual resistance to economic and social exclusion through consumerism and linguistic resources did little to change her condition (any more than it would for any other migrant woman) without “the systemic change of gender ideas and class inequalities in Chinese society…” (119).
Chapter 3 tells the story of a personal gender project through narratives and visual art. Shitou’s personal gender project starts with her re-naming: she abandons her feminine name, and her family name, Shi (Stone), becomes her given name, Shitou, usually gendered male. A prominent, often- interviewed public lesbian figure in China, telling her story as a “coming-out narrative,” as Huang points out, “homogenize[s] both before and after”; further, “her lesbian identity overrides other aspects of her self and her life” (156). Although telling one’s coming out story is a political act, Huang asks whether “a lesbian [can] fully narrate her life and by doing so decenter and denaturalize heterosexuality” (156). Shitou’s retelling refocuses on gender conflict. However, Shitou could not fully narrate her life story in a heteronormative environment. She can represent her lesbian desire visually, shifting from seeing heterosexuality as a reference to embodied self-references (166). Her gender project does not reject Maoist funü in this process. Instead, she drew on her mother (a Maoist funü), “courageous, powerful, and fearless,” but questioned the gender oppression that had surrounded Maoist funü at home.
Chapter 4 tells the story of Anne, a successful post-Mao nüxing. However, she seems unfulfilled. Her life story is “organized around a plotline of self-development” (178). Her mother and her maternal grandmother left positive marks early on, unlike her father. She idolized her mother as both Maoist funü and post-Mao nüxing. She considered her grandmother to be feudal and a jiatingfunü, but also “strong,” “rebellious,” and “people-oriented.” She sees in these three generations “a female tradition of courage, rebellion, and independent-mindedness” (183).
Her transnational experience further shaped her gender project. Adopting Anne as a workplace name, she took on a cosmopolitan identity, rejecting “her Maoist background as manifested in her given name and the Chinese patriarchal root in her father’s family name…” (197). Combining Mandarin and English, Anne’s gender project rested on linguistic and cultural resources. Yet this successful nüxing who has seemingly realized the dream of many Chinese women—“an affluent, liberated, successful, cosmopolitan woman” (214)—is not happy with her life. Why? Huang argues that “her personal dissatisfaction exposes that dream as a dangerous illusion and confirms the ongoing power of earlier models, both Maoist and pre-Maoist, to haunt the present” (214).
Indeed, the book as a whole provides rich stories of personal gender projects, but one caveat might be offered, one which could lead to equally absorbing future projects for this and other authors. The caveat is this: the core premises of the book tend to bracket the very possibility of collective gender projects in a society in which collective social identities have so deeply marked national politics. The multiple decades of reform since 1979 have indeed opened up a rich new set of possibilities for women and other subject positions to express themselves in largely private and sometimes economic spheres. And (perhaps obviously), one consequence of the direction of reform has been to downplay the possibilities of collective self-expression in light of the excess politicization of the Cultural Revolution. But further complementary study is warranted into the self-transformation of institutions representing collective identities that carried over from the Maoist period into the age of reform (e.g., the All-China Women’s Federation, All-China Federation of Trade Unions, etc.). Other expressions of collective identity, including gender identities in engagement with reproductive labour at the level of local community/shequ or local workers’ job actions, are arguably an unalterable feature of complex societies, and therefore would benefit from the same care with which Huang has addressed individual narratives.
Feng Xu
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada