The Phantasm of the Feminine: Gender, Race and Nationalist Agency in Early Twentieth-Century China.

This article seeks to explore the intersecting relationship between gender and race in early twentieth-century China within a transcultural framework. The gendering practices in modern China not only produced sexed bodies, but also provided a space of mediation between western discourses and local tradition, between orientalist representation and imperialist power and between colonial hegemony and nationalist resistance. It is often through this complex process of mediation that a nationalist agency is constructed across mutually contradictory global discourses. In this article, I will first examine the intertwined relationship between gender and race, which binds China’s ‘women question’ squarely with that of men and the nation. Based on the reading of translated and original essays on the women question by Chinese intellectuals, cultural critics and sex theorists in early twentieth-century China, I argue that, along with the spreading of enlightenment discourse that demystified sexed bodies, there was another conspicuous ‘retrograde’ intellectual trend to re–enchant the feminine as a phantasmal source to empower Chinese men and the Chinese nation, resulting in various theories on female superiority and gynocentrism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]