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Becoming Feminist: the Alternative Paths Toward Gender Equality of China's Post-89 Generation

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Becoming Feminist: the Alternative Paths Toward Gender Equality of China's Post-89 Generation UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Becoming Feminist: The Alternative Paths toward Gender Equality of China's Post-89 Generation Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8f76d6x1 Author Deng, Weiling Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Becoming Feminist: The Alternative Educational Paths toward Gender Equality of China’s Post-89 Generation A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Education by Weiling Deng 2018 © Copyright by Weiling Deng 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Becoming Feminist: The Alternative Educational Paths toward Gender Equality of China’s Post-89 Generation by Weiling Deng Doctor of Philosophy in Education University of California, Los Angeles, 2018 Professor Richard Desjardins, Co-Chair Professor Andrea Sue Goldman, Co-Chair This dissertation studies the contemporary Chinese feminist movement, as it was unfolding in multiple faceted ways from 2015 to 2018, placing it within both the deeper historical context of gender struggles in China’s long twentieth century and within the context of both Chinese and global educational systems. It focuses on Chinese feminists of the post-89 generation, who were largely born between 1985 and 1995, have had no experience of participating in significant social movements and protests that marked China’s highly controversial modernization in the last century, and grew up after 1989 in a commodified and depoliticized social-educational environment. The processes in which they become feminists are interpreted in this study as alternative educational paths. Although the post-89 cohort of feminists claim to continue the unfinished liberation of Chinese women from the twentieth century, particularly by inheriting the historically constructed ii term funü, meaning women as state subjects, they have detached themselves from what may seem to be their immediate historical precedents. It is because in their usage of funü is no longer predominantly illustrative of class struggle, but instead is de-historicized to serve poststructuralist cultural politics. This nuanced change demands that the post-89 generation feminists and their movement be studied not through the ideas that influence them, but through the ways in which they, as politicized students, embody those ideas in everyday life. This framework puts the contemporary Chinese feminist movement in line with the student protests in twentieth-century China. The purpose of this study is, in part, to address the underlying educational philosophy of some of the major feminist actions in China that has yet to be discussed in a systematic manner. Works on the politics of pedagogy by Jacques Rancière, Augusto Boal, and Gert Biesta shed light on the deeper thinking of social inequality and seX-based injustice that the post-89 generation feminists inject into their consciousness-raising activism. Another important goal, however, is to draw attention to some unexamined assumptions within this movement that may be contradictory to the philosophy of emancipatory education. The new attempts to break through this impasse have unveiled new horizon of feminist education in China. iii The dissertation of Weiling Deng is approved. Douglas M. Kellner Val D. Rust Richard Desjardins, Committee Co-Chair Andrea Sue Goldman, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2018 iv DEDICATION PAGE This dissertation is dedicated to my grandmother, a woman Communist of no party affiliation and former professor of Peking University’s (PKU) School of Marxism. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ....................................................................................... ii DEDICATION PAGE .................................................................................................................... v TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................... vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... ix VITA ............................................................................................................................................ xiv CHAPTER 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Contextualizing the post-89 generation and their education in the 1990s .............................. 4 1.2 A tripartite theoretical framework: feminism, critical pedagogy, and student protest ............ 7 1.3 Research questions ................................................................................................................ 12 1.4 Methodology ......................................................................................................................... 13 Positionality ........................................................................................................................... 16 Physical sites of ethnography ................................................................................................ 17 Virtual Ethnography .............................................................................................................. 18 Confidentiality ....................................................................................................................... 21 1.5 Chapter Outline ..................................................................................................................... 21 1.6 Significance ........................................................................................................................... 22 CHAPTER 2 A Historical Overview ............................................................................................ 24 2.1 Chinese women’s education of body and mind ..................................................................... 25 vi Women as victims ................................................................................................................. 25 Women as political actors ...................................................................................................... 29 2.2 State feminism and feminine-ism in the 1980s ..................................................................... 31 2.3 The “revisionist” view of agency .......................................................................................... 34 Footbinding and anti-footbinding: an enduring debate over women’s freedom ................... 36 Reform the prostitutes: agency tuned into party-state narrative ............................................ 39 2.4 No innocent political identity in the neoliberal age .............................................................. 42 CHAPTER 3 The Uncommunitarian Students ............................................................................. 51 3.1 The contemporary Chinese university and self-enterprising students ................................... 53 3.2 From high school to college: confusing “women” ................................................................ 60 3.3 “Becoming” is to be on the road ........................................................................................... 64 3.4 The functionally unstable space ............................................................................................ 69 3.5 In the hospital: the displacement of “students” ..................................................................... 74 3.6 Politicization .......................................................................................................................... 78 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 83 CHAPTER 4 Feminist Pedagogies of Unlearning: Emancipatory Theater and Politics .............. 86 4.1 Student protest and theater .................................................................................................... 87 Re-acting the century-old Chinese feminist revolution ......................................................... 91 Political Symbolism of the Costumed Walk-Out? ................................................................ 96 4.3 Theater as protest ................................................................................................................. 101 vii The Vagina Monologues ...................................................................................................... 102 The Shanquan Drama Society and the Theatre of the Oppressed ....................................... 111 CHAPTER 5 Where Is Feminism? ............................................................................................. 119 5.1 One feminist documentary, three facets of China ............................................................... 121 “Do you hear the women sing?” .......................................................................................... 123 Understand the personal without the political ..................................................................... 126 Different temporalities of remembering funü ...................................................................... 129 Reflection ............................................................................................................................. 131 5.2 Reconsidering
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