The Drama of Chinese Feminism
Neoliberal Agency, Post-Socialist Coloniality, and Post-Cold War Transnational Feminist Praxis
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4832505 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Shana Ye (0000-0002-2612-4648, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 783-812 |
| Publication date | 2021-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Feminist Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0046-3663 • E-ISSN: 2153-3873 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/fem.2021.0041 |
| OpenAlex | W4245776775 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 783 Shana Ye The Drama of Chinese Feminism: Neoliberal Agency, Post-Socialist Coloniality, and Post-Cold War Transnational Feminist Praxis On September 27, 2015, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted a New York Times news article about Chinese president Xi Jinping cohosting the United Nations Summit Meeting on Women’s Rights with the comment: “Xi hosting a meeting on women’s rights at the UN while persecuting feminists? Shameless.”1 Clinton’s words refer to the incident in early 2015 when a group of young Chinese feminist activists in Beijing, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou were taken into custody by local police on March 7, the eve of International Women’s Day. After their initial arrest and interrogation, several were released, but five of them were sent to detention centers. Later, Chinese state security broadened its investigation to include many more feminist and human rights activists, leading to the shutdown of several influential women’s rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in China. The five women were later released without formal charges after thirty-seven days of detention, but they have remained criminal suspects and under surveillance since then. 1. Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton), “Xi hosting a meeting on women’s rights at the UN while persecuting feminists? Shameless, #Freethe20, http://hrc.io /1KDkyFz -H,” Twitter, September 27, 2015, 7:39 a.m., https://twitter.com /hillaryclinton/status/648099640714391552?lang=en. 784 Shana Ye This incident generated unprecedented publicity about feminist activism in China and strengthened coalitions among feminists across borders. Images of the five women and the activist activities they previously engaged in, such as performance art, flash mobs, and online discussions , went viral on social media both in China and globally. Influential Chinese feminist scholar Wang Zheng at the University of Michigan sent out a petition through academic listservs calling for transnational feminist support and solidarity.2 Many foreign politicians and government officials, including Clinton and Samantha Power, also stood up and announced their condemnation of this violent act. When the incident happened, I was conducting my doctoral fieldwork in China and got a chance to witness some immediate conversations that occurred within feminist activist communities. What struck me was how easily the complexity of this incident and the differently positioned feminist politics around it were reduced to a familiar Cold War, Orientalist opposition relying on dramatization of the repressive communist party-state vis-à-vis its oppressed yet heroic resisters. This positioning was captured by hyped-up representations of the group that later became known as the Chinese “Feminist Five.” However, these events are also generative when it comes to present-day Chinese feminism ’s self-articulation and transnational feminist organizing. Utilizing concepts of liberalism, human rights, and democracy—all of which the Chinese state has often been accused of lacking—grassroots feminist activists position themselves as victim-resisters against state violence, which allows them to seek redress in the transnational arena. This strategic “turning-away” from the Chinese state and “turning-toward” the transnational reflects an impasse of current feminism: on the one hand, Western liberalism provides an agentic counter-public of subversion, largely animated by eye-catching media capitalism, to raise awareness of women’s oppression that is usually obscured by official socialist state discourse of “equality between men and women.” On the other hand, the singular endorsement of antiauthoritarian feminist resistance and uncritical affinity with transnational feminism—without interrogating 2. Wang Zheng, “Detention of the Feminist Five in China,” Feminist Studies 41, no.2 (2015): 476–82. Shana Ye 785 how its dominant paradigm emerged out of a particular US imperial context—fails to address the problematic ways in which geopolitical asymmetries of post-Cold War colonial relations and neoliberalism have reconfigured the landscape of transnational feminist praxis.3 In this essay, I examine how the drama of what I call the “feminist victim-resister,” sustained by the neoliberal “regime of visibility,” is produced in relation to China’s complex condition within a post-socialist coloniality that has shaped contemporary transnational processes and transitional feminism.4 By “post-socialist coloniality,” I refer to various neocolonial enterprises that intersect with the political economy of the Cold War and continue to
Agency (philosophy) · China · Drama · Feminism · Human rights · Media studies · Political science · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law
| Citations per year | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Highly cited | No |