A Translocal Technology of the Self: Biographies of World Heroines and the Chinese Woman Question

Western heroines became world heroines in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Chinese social imaginary—universal stand-ins for the possibilities of modern womanhood. Reformers committed to resolving the Chinese woman question in this period used the dramatic stories of Joan of Arc, Madame Roland, and other foreign icons in the same way their literati forebears had used the two-millennia-long Chinese tradition of exemplary female biography: as a technology of the female self, a means of regulating and imagining feminine subjecthood. These later authors, nonetheless, shifted biography’s basic function and temporal thrust. Making it an instrument of self-creation rather than merely of emulation, they used it to advance competing aspirations for Chinese modernity, female heroism, and a strengthened nation. Their often conflicting representations of Western women’s lives ultimately expose fissures in China’s own national project. They also highlight the complex ways the female embodiment of the translocal West was integral to definitions of the non-Western local.