Performing a Poetic Temporal Weave: Gender and Femininity in Zhai Yongming's Poetry

This paper examines Zhai Yongming's articulation of gender and femininity by exploring themes and imagery of poems written in different stages of her literary career, ranging from the early 1980s to the present, and argues that Zhai's poetic representations of femininity are closely tied to her evolving temporal consciousness. Her poetic career originated from a strong sense of gender awareness, which she defines as "dark night consciousness," explored in her early poems through the poetic representation of what Kristeva calls "Women's time" that is cyclical and eternal. In later poems, Zhai strives to create new forms of poetic expression by interweaving the past and present. Such experimentation helps articulate a new poetic voice that moves beyond the male/female gender binary, a voice that is at once feminine and beyond femininity.