Feminist Theories and Women Writers of Late Imperial China: Impact and Critique
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Feminism, feminist theory, feminist literary theory were already highly contentious in what they represented to Euro-American critics and theorists in the 1980s, when scholars in Chinese literary studies began sustained research on women writers in late imperial China (ca. 1600–1911). Their research drew on developments in Western feminist theories while problematizing certain applications. In this article, I review major debates in 1980s and 1990s Western feminist literary theory, divided by the different approaches of Anglo-American and French feminist critics and gender studies, examining why specific arguments on women and language, genres studied, and theoretical underpinnings did not hold significant relevance to the study of similar issues when applied to women's writing in pre-twentieth-century China. Yet certain concepts were highly fruitful in critical analysis. Feminist theory was never monolithic, even when it was Eurocentric; theories were drawn from a plurality of different disciplines and schools. Concepts that came into currency—gender, gaze, voice, agency, subjectivity, authorship, and so on—from poststructuralist, postcolonial, cultural, and film studies proved to be useful tools in feminist literary studies. Some came to be deployed in scholarship on women's literature in historical China. In this context, I reflect on theoretical approaches in significant studies of women's writing of late imperial China and consider the impact or critique this subfield of Chinese literary studies posed to Western feminist theories and broader questions of the applicability of modern/postmodern feminist theories to literature of earlier periods and other cultures before the globalization of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".