Herself an Author: Gender, Agency, and Writing in Late Imperial China

Notes

179 Notes Introduction 1. Peggy Kamuf, “Preface,” Signature Pieces, vii. 2. For biographical information on and translations of the writings of these and other early models of women writers, see Idema and Grant, The Red Brush, Chapters 1 and 4. 3. In addition to Ko and Mann, the contributions of Patricia Ebrey to women’s history of the Song period, Francesca Bray to women’s role in technology broadly conceived, and Charlotte Furth to the history of gynecology in China all provide rich analysis of various discursiveformationsofgenderedsubjects .WhatdistinguishesKoandMannistheirrevisionist historiography, effected by bringing in women’s texts for the reconstruction of women’s culture. 4. This difficulty of access led me to pursue a collaborative digitization project with the Harvard-Yenching Library that diverted my time and attention away from the present study. The project resulted in a database and searchable website, accessible for scholarly research, which contains a corpus of more than ninety anthologies and individual works of Ming-Qing women’s poetry and a few works of other genres in the holdings of the Harvard -Yenching Library; see Ming Qing Women’s Writings in the Bibliography. 5. Isobel Armstrong, “The Gush of the Feminine,” 15. Emphasis in the original. 6. The studies by Ellen Widmer on publishing and Maureen Robertson on textual analysis are particularly germane. See the Bibliography. 7. See the Bibliography. 8. In this I am in agreement with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory on the sociology of art in Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. 9. See “Preface to the Second Edition,” Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas Laughlin, ix. 10. San bu xiu, the “Three Immortalities” established through action, virtue, and words (li gong, li de, li yan), discussed in the Zuo zhuan, Duke Xiang 24th year, see Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhengyi, 35.277, in Shisanjing zhushu, vol. 2, 1979. 11. See Sufeng Xu, “The Rhetoric of Legitimation: Prefaces to Women’s Poetry Collection from the Song to Ming.” 12. Don Pease’s essay “Author” provides a succinct genealogy of the changing meanings of “author” and “authorship” in the West from Plato to the recent debates generated by Roland Barthes’s pronouncement on the “death” of the author and the birth of the reader (1w968), Michel Foucault’s reflections on the author-function (1969), and feminist rebuttals of these positions (particularly Barthes’s) vis-à-vis women’s relation to language; in Lentricchia and Laughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study. 13. “Introduction,” Writing and Authority in Early China, 1–4. 14. See Lois McNay, Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory. 15. “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, 25. As Homi Bhabba puts it succinctly in The Location of Culture, 185, agency is “the activity of the contingent.” 16. Agency is the operative concept in the following revisionary feminist studies in literature and art history: Paula Backscheider, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre; and Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard. See the strategic return to agency in the works of cultural and postcolonial critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabba. In the Asian field, the essays in the volume Narratives of Agency, edited by Wimal Dissanayake, focus on the “historical and cultural conditions that facilitate the discursive production of agency” in approaching the cultures under study, “Introduction,” ix. Dissanayake draws on Paul Smith’s classic Discerning the Subject for definitions of self, subject, individual, agent. 17. “Changing the Subject,” esp. 175–179. Robertson also draws on Paul Smith’s discussion of the concept. 18. “The coexistence or convergence of such discursive injunctions produces the possibility of a complex reconfiguration and redeployment; it is not a transcendental subject who enables action in the midst of such a convergence. . . . There is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very ‘taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there”; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 145. 19. “Theorizing Woman: Funü, Guojia, Jiating (Chinese Women, Chinese State, Chinese Family),” in Body, Subject & Power in China, edited by Angela Zito and Tani Barlow. 20. In this particular instance, the constructed role may be inflected by that of maternal caring. 21. “Writing the Self,” in Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern, A Reader, edited by Seán Burke, 303. 22. The idea of resistance often associated with agency invoked in feminist usage would be largely...