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Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Series

2011

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

The Legacy Of Crossdressing In Tanci: A Histoire Of Heroic Women And Men, Li Guo Dec 2011

The Legacy Of Crossdressing In Tanci: A Histoire Of Heroic Women And Men, Li Guo

Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This essay studies a tanci work, A Histoire of Heroic Women and Men (1905), as a case which reflects the intersecting themes of crossdressing, gender representation and the literary form of tanci. Written tanci, appropriated and redeveloped by educated women to tell stories of female crossdressers, scholars, and military leaders, offers a meaningful intervention in the dominant social and cultural discourses of womanhood in late imperial China. In the fictional realm, women’s acts of crossdressing transcend the Confucian ideological prescriptions of feminine identity, displaying their heroic efforts to pursue autonomy in a patriarchal culture. This essay will analyze how these …


Making History Anew: Feminine Melodrama In Eileen Chang's Love In A Fallen City, Li Guo Dec 2011

Making History Anew: Feminine Melodrama In Eileen Chang's Love In A Fallen City, Li Guo

Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This essay will explore the narrative mode of feminine melodrama in Love in a Fallen City, a novella by the Shanghainese writer Eileen Chang (1920–1995). Chang has gained international fame for her depiction of Chinese women in the tumultuous transitional period prior to the modern era, especially traditional women figures that are in stark contrast with the New Woman ideal portrayed by her contemporary writers. Born in Shanghai, Chang was a descendant of an eminent late imperial official and received western education in Hong Kong under the influence of her open-minded mother. A literary sensation at the age of twenty-five, …