Theorizing Woman: Funu, Guojia, Jiating [Chinese Women, Chinese State, Chinese Family]

The theorizing part of my argument revolves around three points best expressed in aphorism. First, in Trinh T. Minh-ha's phrase, Woman as subject can only redefine while being defined by language. Funu, or women, object of my genealogical attention, is su.bject in Trinh's sense; to this day politics of funu involve redefinition while being defined, as I will illustrate. Yet while language situates and constitutes, it does so within constraints of canon, text, and tradition. Gayatri Spivak's What narratives produce signifiers of subject for other traditions? thus compels situated, or historical response. Finally, distilled in my assertions (that Chinese intellectuals' appropriation of imperialists' sex binary in their struggle against patrilineally expressed difference opened bodies of peasant women to state's restructuring) is particular view of history: in Nietzsche's motto, the cause or origin of thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment in system of purposes, lie worlds apart. 1 Attention to these points allows me to argue that hegemonic funu/women, principal female subject position available to women under Chinese socialism, took shape in a system of purposes that constitutes genealogy? One kininflected category, funulkinswomen, became tradition against which cultural revolutionaries in 1920s posed colonial sign, woman, they called nuxing. Political funulwomen, element of Chinese Communist party nomenklatura, contested Westernized nuxinglwoman, redesignating it as bourgeois, and marked it off as normatively forbidden. The Revolution resituated funulwomen inside guojialstate (and thus by synechdochic logic, inside jiatinglfamily) under Maoist inscription. Modern funulwomen thus provided staging ground, offering sexed bodies of peasant women as space of modernization. In other words, despite some linguistic resemblances, contemporary official language marks discontinuity in Chinese women's history. Eighteenth-century funulkinswoman d Maoist funulwoman are linked, but only tangentially. s Funul women actually belongs in discursive constellation with other modern state categories, like worker (gongren) and youth (qingnian) and proletariat