This study provides a critical inquiry into the textual (self-)representations of Chinese females’ perception and experience of “women’s liberation” in 1949-1966 Chinese women’s autobiographical and fictional writings. Through historical and textual analyses, it looks into Chinese women’s multiple textual/discursive practices and their subjectivities constituted in the process. These narrative practices are treated as salient sites of women’s struggle for self-understanding, self-liberating as well as self-inventing in their own specific social and cultural conditions. The study aims to disclose the complexity of the discursive field centering on the topic of socialist women’s liberation and the dynamic interplay between different female authors and the socialist political/gender discourses within 1949-1966 socialist cultural public sphere. The thesis first examines the autobiographical, first-person female narratives appeared on three Fulian(Women’s Federation)–sponsored national and local women’s magazines: Women of China (中国妇女), Beijing Women (北京妇女), and Modern Women (现代妇女). It probes into how female narrators, from different social backgrounds, understand and restructure in their writings their past and present lives in terms of (public) labor, female freedom and new social identification. Secondly, the thesis investigates fictions and plays by female writers, which provide historically-specific gendered perspectives to the issue of “women’s liberation” as well as women’s position in and their relationship with socialism. It explores women’s perception of public and domestic labor, their formation of collective identities in the process of socialist construction, their gender struggle with and contestation to the persistent ideology of patriarchy in the new social order, all of which are revealed in their literary practices. This thesis argues that in these different sorts of writings, the representations of experience of “women’s liberation” are intimately related, but not identical, to the state-sanctioned conceptual and discursive framework. Socialist political and gender discourses actually exert unpredictable, diffuse, locally and individually contingent effects on Chinese women who actively engage in different forms of writing. The self-perception and self-fashioning represented in these women’s cultural practices are enabled by, but may also go beyond, the revolutionary language or state-inflected discourses, indicating more complicated and specific meanings of Chinese socialist ideologies and practices for individual women. Different writers choose or abandon, appropriate or dis-employ, embrace or interrogate, be close to or keep at a distance certain socialist political and gender discourses, in order to forge and interpret women’s experience from their own specific contexts. They may be empowered by the revolutionary discourses and rhetoric, yet they do not identify themselves as mere passive beneficiaries of the socialist regime, but as active agents in their self-liberation and self-transformation. It is in this process that their different subjectivities are constituted, their agency created and asserted. / published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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This dissertation offers the first full-length study of five feminist writing practices developed between May 1968 and the publication of Rachel Blau DuPlessis's The Pink Guitar in 1990: ecriture feminine (Helene Cixous), ecriture au feminin/writing in the feminine (Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Lola Lemire Tostevin), lesbian/political writing (Monique Wittig), innecriture (Trinh T. Minh-ha), and writing as feminist practice (DuPlessis). These share what I call a feminist poetics; I develop the concept of "sympathy" (the transmission of symptoms from one body to the next) to explain how they nourish one another. I recount their poststructuralist context, and outline key historical influences, such as the student protests of 1968, the nascent women's movements in France and North America, and feminist cultural production in the 1970s. I then describe their poetics---the textual, grammatical, and semantic strategies used to undermine the patriarchal symbolic. I focus on the status and function of the female body in this feminist poetics, and suggest the body provides it with a non-essentialist theoretical foundation. I conclude by evaluating two models that best describe these writing practices: the palimpsest and the matrix. While the palimpsest, with its textual allusions, is an attractive model, I suggest that the matrix offers two advantages: its corporeal connotations and its emphasis on writing as process.

This thesis offers a feminist analysis of women and gender in the novels of Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Delphine Zanga Tsogo, Calixthe Beyala, Werewere Liking, Mariama Ba, Miriam Tlali and Bessie Head. My analyses appropriate and rethink western feminist theories of gender and post-colonial literary theory. I maintain that the texts analyzed are also theoretical, since feminist theory is embedded in the polysemy of the texts themselves. The study demonstrates that identity and sexuality are not static sites of oppression for women. They are contesting terrains where the subversion of difference, and the construction of identity, subjectivity and sexuality, are interlocking issues. Women's positional perspectives and varying subject positions are shown to be their strengths.

This masters thesis in creative writing is comprised of two sections, a critical review of contemporary love stories written by women in the narrative mode and a novel entitled Si tes reves m'etaient contes. / In our study of Le recit amoureux feminin actuel, we attempt to explain women's preference for the narrative mode, to describe the new vocabulary of love and highlight its specific meaning and style. How do women write about love, how do they portray men, what have become their amorous preoccupations in the recent years? / Si tes reves m'etaient contes is the story of Catherine who, fast approaching her forties, reflects upon her life and her marriage. She is forced to conclude that her husband, whom she thought she knew so intimately, is no longer the man she married. He has become a stranger to her.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2001. / Adviser: Kevin Dunn. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 248-292). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Australia, 2006.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1992. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [241]-270).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2007. / Title from title page screen, viewed on July 16, 2008. Dissertation Committee: Cynthia A. Huff (chair), Ronald L. Strickland, Paula Ressler. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 270-282) and abstract. Also available in print.