Customer Reviews

Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experimental Fiction

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Just like a hadnful of avant-garde women of the 1920s and 1930s who fought against patriarchal ideology old and new, Lu Tonglin stands full square on the side of China's women. Throughout the centuries Chinese women have been exploited under feudalism, under communism, and now under capitalism ('socialism with Chinese characteristics'). Lu Tonglin's charge in this book is that most Chinese cwriters, and indeed film-makers, have done little to alleviate that victimization, indeed portraying women as the symbolical other they have compounded and profited from women's unequal status. The role of women has been two-sided. "On the one hand, this Other has made opposition possible. On the other hand, precisely because the opposition must be defined to the detriment of a silenced other, it cannot be considered truly democratic."(187) Any future political project in China that claims to be democratic or progressive must address this problem, and must cease to deny women their subject positions, otherwise as Lu Tonglin concludes "the patriarchal structure of the past will continue to haunt the rebellious sons, who are desperately and vainly trying to break away from the past by means of a cultural nihilism that justifies destruction and violence." (187)