Response

A point that I particularly appreciated in Ellen DuBois's response to The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism regards politics and language. As DuBois notes, when writing about super–charged categories, such as womanhood, I have emphasized the active role of ideas in social, political movements. In part that is because twentieth–century Chinese history is inconceivable in the absence of the political. Also, given that women as a question in politics played a part in Chinese revolutionary and governance politics, I quite agree with DuBois's characterization of the book as concerned primarily with "the actively normative rather than passively descriptive role of language in political movements, the rich history built into terms that are so functional that they disappear into the very social reality that they are helping to create." It is the sense–making power of what DuBois calls language here that concerns me. Of course, I apparently differ with her somewhat on how language connects to political action. But she is right in pointing out that the temporality I stress in the book, future anteriority, serves to accentuate political thinking. As she puts it, "'future anteriority' points in the direction of action," and does so "because it assumes that the flow of history can be affected by human interaction."

I set out to make a history of feminist writing in revolutionary times. Considering people more like me than not, i.e., engaged intellectuals, there was a sense in which my subjects and I share common reference points. This book is not about women's experience. It is about projects that framed women as such. Francesca Bray's excellent Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China illustrates the difference.¹ Bray's emphasis on the ideological production of women through favored types of so–called womanly work undercuts simple ideas of what a woman is, but it retains an emphasis on women's experience and thereby distinguishes between frame and framed experience. I claim without apology that modern theorists on the China mainland, while they did not create new ideas out of whole cloth, did define with reference to science and sociology what would be proper to the sexes (they later reinvented womanly work in Chinese Communist Party social policy, as well). In that regard I wrote a book about the privileges of thinking. Neither the intellectuals whose work I showcased nor I myself are historical determinists; in fact, some of us stand accused of Maoist voluntarism.

An important common arena Sharon Sievers and I appear to share is a belief in the historical centrality of eugenic logics and the significance of eugenic racism in intellectual and political history. I read eugenicist texts written by men and some women (in this particular case gender difference seems immaterial) as both racist and enabling. One of my underlying arguments is that the global historical order of heterosexuality may rest on eugenic logics. Another argument is that shifting the power of marital partner choice from parents exclusively to child, or child and parent, led to a situation where marriage markets themselves universalized racist motives. Sievers and I may also agree on the question of the centrality of eugenics because we have overlapping specializations. Early–twentieth–century Japan, which is Sievers's national specialization, and treaty port China shared a wide current of ideas. Elements in the current included social Darwinism, popular eugenicism, the importance of public health and hygiene, and debates over modern women's subjective positioning.

The founders of twentieth–century Chinese modern thought were nationalist youth educated in Japan, the United States, and Europe. This is the point at which theorist Gayatri Spivak became central to my project. I show that a historical catachresis stabilizes momentarily what is actually an excessive amount of mixed, fractured, inchoate historical detritus. This is not the same point as Spivak makes. In my formula the word "catachresis" highlights the importance of language in making history coherent, or comprehensible, while the "historical" part underscores historian Joan Scott's point years ago that while there is no such thing as unmediated experience, reported and thus narrativized experience is part of the picture...