The Gender Legacy Of The Mao Era

Shows that the feminist interventions of the Mao era (1949–1976) continue to influence contemporary Chinese women. This book traces how the legacy of the Maoist gender project is experienced or contested by particular Chinese women, remembered or forgotten in their lives, and highlighted or buried in their narratives. Xin Huang examines four women’s life stories: an urban woman who lived through the Mao era (1949–1976), a rural migrant worker, a lesbian artist who has close connections with transnational queer networks, and an urban woman who has lived abroad. The individual narratives are paired with analysis of the historical and social contexts in which each woman lives. Huang focuses on the shifting relationship between gender and class, fashion and shame in the Mao and post-Mao eras, queer desire and artwork, and contemporary transnational encounters. By rethinking the historical significance and contemporary relevance of one of the twentieth century’s major feminist interventions—socialist and Marxist women’s liberation during the Mao years—The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era provides insight into current struggles over gender equality in China and around the world. Xin Huang is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Some of Us is a collection of memoirs by nine Chinese women who grew up during the Mao era. All hail from urban backgrounds and all have obtained their Ph.D.s in the United States; thus, their memories are informed by intellectual training and insights that only distance can allow. Each of the chapters--arranged by the age of the author--is crafted by a writer who reflects back to that time in a more nuanced manner than has been possible for Western observers. The authors attend to gender in a way that male writers have barely noticed and reflect on their lives in the United States.

This new social history of Maoist China provides an accessible view of the complex and tumultuous period when China came under Communist rule.

This book explores the extent to which women have been initiators, mobilizers, and driving forces of social transformation in China. The book considers how conceptions of women’s roles have changed as China has moved from state socialism to engagement with capitalist globalization, examines the growth of women’s gender and sexual consciousness and social movements for women’s rights, including for marginalized social and sex/gender grouops, and discusses women’s roles in society-state interactions, including many forms of social activism, cultural events, educational innovations, and more. Overall, the book demonstrates that women have not simply been passive receivers of the consequences of the forces of global capitalism, but that they have had a profound, active impact on social transformation in China.

Afterlives of Chinese Communism comprises essays from over fifty world- renowned scholars in the China field, from various disciplines and continents. It provides an indispensable guide for understanding how the Mao era continues to shape Chinese politics today. Each chapter discusses a concept or practice from the Mao period, what it attempted to do, and what has become of it since. The authors respond to the legacy of Maoism from numerous perspectives to consider what lessons Chinese communism can offer today, and whether there is a future for the egalitarian politics that it once promised.

Challenges the accepted wisdom about women and gender roles in medieval China. In Crossing the Gate, Man Xu examines the lives of women in the Chinese province of Fujian during the Song dynasty. Tracking women’s life experience across class lines, outside as well as inside the domestic realm, Xu challenges the accepted wisdom about women and gender roles in medieval China. She contextualizes women in a much broader physical space and social network, investigating the gaps between ideals and reality and examining women’s own agency in gender construction. She argues that women’s autonomy and mobility, conventionally attributed to Ming-Qing women of late imperial China, can be traced to the Song era. This thorough study of Song women’s life experience connects women to the great political, economic, and social transitions of the time, and sheds light on the so-called “Song-Yuan-Ming transition” from the perspective of gender studies. By putting women at the center of analysis and by focusing on the local and the quotidian, Crossing the Gate offers a new and nuanced picture of the Song Confucian revival.

This book is a study of the transformation of Chinese political consciousness during the post-Mao era. Departing from the common wisdom of the day that Deng Xiaoping's pragmatic-oriented reform has made ideological discussion irrelevant, this book holds that while it is probably true that no single, fixed ideology has existed during the period, the ideological dimensions not only have persisted, but also can be analyzed systematically.