Rethinking Women Writers and the Gendered Spaces of Print Media

Two recent books explore Chinese women’s subjectivity in print culture and argue that the transcultural mediations of global modernity in China played a vital role in constituting female subjectivities. Both books present new methodologies and challenge our understanding of women’s empowerment in the discursive spaces of print media. These works reveal that women writers could gain public recognition only through the conventions and structures of the gendered spaces of print media.

This essay discusses the following works. Megan M. Ferry. Chinese Women Writers and Modern Print Culture. Cambria Sinophone World Series. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2018. 271 pp. $109.99 (cloth). | Michel Hockx, Joan Judge, and Barbara Mittler, eds. Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Century: A Space of Their Own? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 421 pp. $120.00 (cloth), $39.99 (paper).