The Empowered Feminine: Gender, Racial, and Nationalist Discourses

Abstract

This chapter examines the male-authored discourse on female empowerment developed through a complex system of transcultural mediation in early twentieth-century China. Some scholars have already pointed out that Chinese feminism “is always already a global discourse, and the history of its local reception is a history of the politics of translation” (Ko and Wang 2006, 463). Therefore, it is reasonable to view Chinese feminism as a relatively autonomous growth in the mesh of various traditional, nationalist, and colonial discourses. This chapter aims to show that Chinese feminism is neither a borrowed discourse nor one completely subsumed by nationalism; it is, in fact, an integral part of a global feminism coauthored by Chinese intellectuals through their creative translation of Western-produced knowledge.