ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5322-6853
Date of Award
9-8-2023
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
Extant scholarship focusing on the rise of concepts such as feminism and New Woman in modern Chinese history tends to examine “women” as a category that cuts across age. Informed by the nascent field of girlhood studies, this dissertation investigates youth as an analytic category and scrutinizes age as an axis of power relations in the history of modern Chinese women and girls. Instead of examining youth merely as a social category or the embodiment of national vitality, the current study proposes to approach youth as a tactic-strategy of Chinese feminism. Focusing on the formation and contestation of “female youth” (nü qingnian) as an evolving identity in China during the first half of the twentieth century, this study explores the invention of youthhood for girls in late Qing political novels, the emergence of female youth in personal correspondences and literary periodicals during the May Fourth period, the multi-media presence of Nationalist Party’s model female youth Yang Hui-min, and female youth in the literary works of Communist writers such as Tian Han and Ding Ling. Positioning female youth as the opposite of “mother of citizens” (guomin zhimu), these examples unveil the ways young women and proponents of Nora-esque feminism have subverted the androcentric concept of youth, reconfiguring it as a tactic for transgressing the boundaries imposed by gender norms that instrumentalized women’s reproductive bodies and circumscribe their roles to domestic spheres. Nevertheless, this reconfiguration is fraught with contradictions. The adoption of youth as a tactic-strategy, in the sense defined by Michel de Certeau, for individualized, gendered empowerment is susceptible to challenges posed by biological essentialism and politicized youth membership. In sum, in interpreting “female youth” as an emancipatory category conditioned by scientific and political discourses, this study identifies an uncharted territory where the constantly evolving concepts of “youth” and “women” converge in the practice of transforming the youthful reproductive female bodies into the agents of social change.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Lingchei Letty Chen
Recommended Citation
Dou, Miao, "Beyond Domesticity: Youth and Chinese Feminism, 1900-1949" (2023). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3166.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3166