Introduction: A Global Intellectual History of Feminism

In this introduction, Rao discusses the importance of The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, edited by Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, and the resulting Kitabkhana, or book forum. The contributors to the Kitabkhana address The Birth of Chinese Feminism as an inaugural text for two reasons: first, for the manner in which the author-editors have framed and conceptualized the distinctive nature of He-Yin Zhen's interventions; and second, for the text's ability to address histories of modern gendering in non-Western locales, thus generating a global consideration of the social and political interventions that staged gender as a problem of both embodiment and inequality.