Introduction: The Feminine at Large

Abstract

In an essay written 40 years ago, feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin talks about her dream: “The dream I find most compelling is one of an androgynous and genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (204). Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century shared a similar dream, albeit one with more racial implications: they endeavored to extricate the feminine from the stark colonial sex/gender system, and used it as an autonomous agent to salvage the Chinese race from its condemned fate. Their active reformation of the feminine effectively subverted the Western gaze that intended to associate China with an essentialized femininity of weakness, passivity, and decadence. In this cultural imagination, the feminine was conceived, in an unprecedented and unparalleled manner, as an empowering source that in turn gave birth to viable modern subjectivities.