Chinese Women’s History: Global Circuits, Local meanings

Recent Chinese women’s history focuses on the production of globally-inflected, locally situated Chinese knowledge about modernity, the gendered body, and female selfhood. This article explores three particularly fertile areas of research that explore various facets of this global/local nexus while challenging broader historical narratives and expanding the existing historical archive. The first is the emergence at the turn of the twentieth century of a feminist analytics of reform that defies conventional notions of Chinese modernity. The second is the theorization and practice of women’s medicine from the imperial through the communist eras that highlights the singularity of Chinese conceptions of the gendered body and the social status of the female healer. The third is the uncovering of non-textual avenues to—and the questioning of the very premises of—Chinese women’s historical experience through oral history and visual sources.