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Feminism, Women's Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China focuses on a sensational elopement in the Yangzi Delta in the late 1920s to explore how middle- and lower-class members of society gained access to and appropriated otherwise alien and abstract enlightenment theories and idioms about love, marriage, and family. Via a network of communications that connected people of differing socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, non-elite women were empowered to display their new womanhood and thereby exercise their self-activating agency to mount resistance to China's patriarchal system. Qiliang He's text also investigates the proliferation of anti-feminist conservatisms in legal practice, scholarly discourses, media, and popular culture in the early Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). Utilizing a framework of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book traverses various fields such as legal history, women's history, popular culture/media studies, and literary studies to explore urban discourse and communication in 1920s China.
List of contents
Chapter 0: Introduction.- Chapter 1: In Search of Women's Agency in Everyday Life: The Construction of the Huang-Lu Love Affair in the Press.- Chapter 2: The Trials of Lu Genrong: The Criminal Law Reform and Women's Agency in Late 1920s China.- Chapter 3: Polysemy: Discussions and Debates on the Huang-Lu Love Affair.- Chapter 4: Polyphony: Vernacularized Feminisms and the Urban Network of Communication.- Chapter 5: Vernacularization as Global and Local Experiences: The Huang-Lu Affair in Film and Literature.- Chapter 6: Conclusion.
About the author
Qiliang He is Associate Professor in History at Illinois State University, USA. He is the author of
Gilded Voices: Economics, Politics, and Storytelling in the Yangzi Delta Since 1949 (2012) and numerous articles on cultural history in twentieth-century China. He has also translated three books on Chinese history.
Summary
Feminism, Women’s Agency, and Communication in Early Twentieth-Century China focuses on a sensational elopement in the Yangzi Delta in the late 1920s to explore how middle- and lower-class members of society gained access to and appropriated otherwise alien and abstract enlightenment theories and idioms about love, marriage, and family. Via a network of communications that connected people of differing socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, non-elite women were empowered to display their new womanhood and thereby exercise their self-activating agency to mount resistance to China’s patriarchal system. Qiliang He’s text also investigates the proliferation of anti-feminist conservatisms in legal practice, scholarly discourses, media, and popular culture in the early Nanjing Decade (1927-1937). Utilizing a framework of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book traverses various fields such as legal history, women’s history, popular culture/media studies, and literary studies to explore urban discourse and communication in 1920s China.
