Gendered Words: Sentiments and Expression in Changing Rural China - Hardcover

Liu, Fei-wen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190210400 ISBN 13: 9780190210403

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Built on twenty years of fieldwork in rural Jiangyong of Hunan Province in south China, this book explores the world's only gender-defined and now disappearing "women's script" known as nüshu. What drove peasant women to create a script of their own and write, and how do those writings throw new light on how gender is addressed in epistemology and historiography and how the unprivileged social class uses marginalized forms of expression to negotiate with the dominant social structure. Further, how have the politics of salvaging this disappearing centuries-old cultural heritage molded a new poetics in contemporary society?

This book explores nüshu in conjunction with the local women's singing tradition (nüge), tied into the life narratives of four women born in the 1910s, 1930s, and 1960s respectively, each representative in her own way: a nüge singer (majority of Jiangyong women), a child bride (enjoying not much nüshu/nüge), the last living traditionally-trained nüshu writer, and a new-generation nüshu transmitter. Altogether, their stories unfold peasant women's lifeworlds and forefronts various aspects of China's changing social milieu over the past century. They show how nüshu/nüge-registering women's sense and sensibilities and providing agency to subjects who have been silenced by history-constitute a reflexive social field whereby women share life stories to expand the horizon of their personal worldviews and probe beneath the surface of their existence for new inspiration in their process of becoming. With the concept of "expressive depths," this book opens a new vista on how women express themselves through multiple forms that simultaneously echo and critique the mainstream social system and urges a rethinking of how forms of expression define and confine the voice carried. Examining the multiple efforts undertaken by scholars, local officials, and cultural entrepreneurs to revive nüshu which have ironically threatened to disfigure its true face, this book poses a question of whither nüshu? Should it be transformed, or has it reached a perfect end point from which to fade into history?

About this title

About the Author

Fei-wen Liu is Associate Research Fellow and Museum Curator at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. She has conducted fieldwork in rural south China on the world's only gender-defined and now disappearing "women's script" known as nüshu since 1992. She has published in many flagship journals of the concerning fields: Journal of Asian Studies, Modern China, American Ethnologist, Journal of American Folklore, etc.; and has produced a nüshu documentary entitled Calling and Recalling: The Sentiments of Nüshu.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0190210400
• ISBN 13: 9780190210403
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272