Spaces of Their Own

by Yang, Mayfair Mei-Hui

• ISBN13: 9780816631469
• ISBN10: 0816631468
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr

Summary

How are the public and political lives of Chinese women constrained by states and economies? And how have pockets of women's consciousness come to be produced in and disseminated from this traditionally masculine milieu? The essays in this volume examine the possibilities for a public sphere for Chinese women, one that would both emerge from concrete historical situations and local contexts and cut across the political boundaries separating the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the West. The challenges of this project are taken up in essays on the legacy of state feminism on the Mainland as contrasted with a grassroots women's movement challenging the state in Taiwan; on the role of the capitalist consumer economy in the emerging lesbian movement in Taiwan; and on the increased trafficking of women as brides, prostitutes, and mistresses between the Mainland and wealthy male patrons in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The writers' examples of masculine domination in the media include the reformulation of Chinese women in Fifth Generation films for a transnational Western male film audience and the portrayal of Mainland women in Taiwanese and Hong Kong media. The contributors also consider male nationalism as it is revealed through both international sports coverage on television and in a Chinese television drama. Other works examine a women's museum, a telephone hotline in Beijing, the films of Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, the transnational contacts of a Taiwanese feminist organization, the diaspora of Mainland women writers, and the differences between Chinese and Western feminist themes.

Table of Contents

Editor's Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 1
The Political Economy of Gender and Feminism
From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women's Public Sphere in China	p. 35
Practicing NGOness and Relating Women's Space Publicly: The Women's Hotline and the State	p. 68
Expanding Women's Space and Building a Women's Public Sphere
How the Feminist Movement Won Media Space in Taiwan: Observations by a Feminist Activist	p. 95
Museum as Women's Space: Displays of Gender in Post-Mao China	p. 116
Feminism's Double: Lesbian Activism in the Mediated Public Sphere of Taiwan	p. 132
Women on the Edges of Hong Kong Modernity: The Films of Ann Hui	p. 162
Masculine Nationalism and the Male Public Sphere
Rewriting Chinese Women: Gender Production and Cultural Space in the Eighties and Nineties	p. 191
Strong Women and Impotent Men: Sports, Gender, and Nationalism in Chinese Public Culture	p. 207
White Women, Male Desires: A Televisual Fantasy of the Transnational Chinese Family	p. 232
Transnational Crossings of Gender Images and Feminist Discourse
With What Discourse Do We Reflect on Chinese Women? Thoughts on Transnational Feminism in China	p. 261
Gender and a Geopolitics of Desire: The Seduction of Mainland Women in Taiwan and Hong Kong Media	p. 278
The World Map of Haunting Dreams: Reading Post-1989 Chinese Women's Diaspora Writings	p. 308
Afterword	p. 337
Bibliography	p. 341
Contributors	p. 365
Index	p. 369
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