A Genealogy of "Woman"

This is a powerful book, one that will likely have an impact on the Chinese field for some time to come. It is also an occasionally maddening work, mixing theoretical brilliance with prose that is far beyond opaque, and an unhappy tendency to exclude discussion of the work of some scholars who have made important contributions to questions raised here.

Barlow is a prolific scholar whose work is firmly grounded in an effort to move critical scholarship forward—beyond the orientalisms of the past and the comfortable East/West binaries that have been a hallmark of postwar Western scholarship on Asia. Barlow's primary vehicle, in this work as in others, is postmodern theory, supported and augmented by her own critical energies and an admirable command of film theory, psychoanalysis, literature, and history. Given the yawning chasm that continues to exist between cultural/critical studies and the social sciences generally, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism is likely to generate heat as well as light among scholars of Chinese history and gender, a subject to which I would like to return.

On one level, Barlow's book can be read as a genealogy of the term "woman" in Chinese history, but it is equally an effort to challenge, if not blast away, seemingly intractable barriers: the privileging of the voices (and theories) of Western feminism, and long–held assumptions about the history and nature of feminism itself—the issue of feminism as part of the "Western impact" on Asia that contributed to Asian modernizing, for example. Borrowing from "social theorists" Raymond Williams and Gayatri Spivak, Barlow presents "woman" in Chinese history as an example of historical catachresis, "a concept–metaphor without an adequate referent" (15)—"woman" may be both experienced and intellectualized, and can be a "repository of past meaning," but ultimately has no concrete historical referent (34). Barlow couples her presentation of various historical translations of "woman" (nuxing and funu) as catachreses, with what she refers to as "future anteriority"—emphasizing "woman" as a name for potentiality, a way of looking at present and past that emphasizes the hopes and expectations of those engaged in discussions of "woman" in China, as opposed to descriptions of "things as they allegedly really were" (3). This strategy, unwieldy as it seems (to me at least), does hold out the possibility that some of the hegemonic assumptions embedded in Western analysis might be diluted or discredited in favor of Chinese scholarship; and while knowledge about Chinese women might be organized around Chinese agendas (including those of the state), a close reading of those agendas could provide more important insights about the potential of "woman" in Chinese history.

There was, in Barlow's view, no generic term for "woman" in China prior to the twentieth century; women were signified by their relation to the family and to each other, as daughters, mothers, sisters, and wives. Barlow emphasizes this point in her summary of the description of Chen Hongmou, an eighteenth–century thinker: "Before [women] are married [they] are nu/female/daughters; when [they] get married they are fu or wives; and when [they] give birth to children [they] are mu or mothers. As soon as I render it this way, I have substantiated a category, Women, that does not appear in the syntax of the sentence" (42). Woman, says Barlow, is a transcendental signifier, not a "collective noun" produced by the structures of kinship relations. Two generic terms for women (nuxing and funu) do appear in the twentieth century, as a part of China's effort to modernize in the face of aggressive imperialisms; the construction of these terms, in Barlow's view, parallels the processes of Chinese modernization, and underscores the critical importance women assumed in the development of China as a modern state.

Barlow's discussion of the construction of the neologism nuxing (the female sex, or female of the species) relies primarily on the theorizing of male intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s whose works Barlow considers a formative element in the Chinese feminist canon. Mei Sheng, whose belief that women were "central both to social evolution and to social...