Notes
Notes Introduction 1 See Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, vol. 4, Asia-Local Studies/Global Themes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Gail Hershatter, “State of the Field: Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century,” Journal of Asian Studies 63, no. 4 (November 2004); Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Susan Mann, ed., Women and Gender Relations: Perspectives on Asia: Sixty Years of the Journal of Asian Studies (Ann Arbor, M.I.: Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2004). The exhaustive reviews by Hershatter and Mann are particularly useful. They discuss the issues and substantive works that relate to the social relations of the sexes in the Chinese family, marriage, and kinship (Chinese anthropology in the tradition of Freedman, Cohen, Wolf, Watson), to women’s agency and resistance (liberal feminist approaches in the 1970s and 1980s), and nuanced gender subjectivities in different historical and regional cultural contexts (poststructuralist, deconstructionist orientations since the 1980s). The analytical progression corresponds quite well with similar issues and concerns in the literature about other cultures and societies. Beginning with the classic volumes (for example, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, Louise Lamphere, and Joan Bamberger, eds., Woman, Culture, and Society [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974]; Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, eds., Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality [Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981]; Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975]), there have been many critical approaches to gender. They challenge the dichotomy of nature and culture, the material and the symbolic, repression, and resistance. Tracing theoretical genealogy from Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler, and the like, a new generation of ethnographies focuses on power and embodied gender practices in everyday life. These works have taken center stage in academic discourse. Studies that are intellectually useful for the comparative study of gender subjectivities in the Chinese context are those from Islamic and South Asian areas. See Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation Postcolonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). 2 See the following books: Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 3 Maurice Freedman, Lineage Organization in Southeastern China, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology (London: Athlone Press, 1958); Hugh Baker, A Chinese Lineage Village: Sheung Shui (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968); James L. Watson and Rubie S. Watson, Village Life in Hong Kong: Politics, Gender, and Ritual in the New Territories (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2004). 4 Marjorie Topley, “Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwangtung,” in Women in Chinese Society, ed. Margery Wolf, Roxane Witke, and Emily M. Ahern (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975); Janice E. Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China, 1860–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Helen F . Siu, “Where Were the Women? Rethinking Marriage Resistance and Regional Culture History,” Late Imperial China 11, no. 2 (December 1990); Myron Cohen, “Lineage Development and the Family in China,” in The Chinese Family and Its Ritual Behavior, ed. Jih-chang Hsieh and Ying-chang Chuang (Taipei: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 1985). 5 David Faure and Helen F . Siu, eds., Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 6 Siu, “Where Were the Women? Rethinking Marriage Resistance and Regional Culture History,” 32–62. 7 See Gail Hershatter, Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (Berkeley: Global, Area, and International Archive, University of California Press, 2007). For a recent challenge to Freedman’s lineage paragidm, see David Faure, Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). A summary can be found in the review by Helen F . Siu, “Review Article: Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China by David Faure,” The China Quarterly 192 (December 2007): 1041–43. 8 Sherry Ortner, “Gender and Sexuality in Hierarchical Societies: The Case of Polynesia and Some Comparative Implications,” in Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead...
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