Representing Divorce, Reforming Interiority: Narratives of Gender, Class and Family in Post-Reform Chinese Literature and Culture
Xiao, Hui
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/87211
Description
Title
Representing Divorce, Reforming Interiority: Narratives of Gender, Class and Family in Post-Reform Chinese Literature and Culture
Author(s)
Xiao, Hui
Issue Date
2009
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Xu, Gary G.
Department of Study
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Discipline
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Asian Studies
Language
eng
Abstract
"This project stands at the juncture of modern Chinese literature, post-socialist studies, cultural history of divorce, and critical studies about global middle-class cultures. Employing analytical tools mainly from literary studies, cultural studies and feminist theories, I examine stories, novels, films and TV dramas about divorce produced between 1980 and 2004, in the wake of China's ""economic reform and opening up"" as well as the post-Reform China's changing divorce scene. Investigating the transforming intersections of gender, family, and class, I argue that divorce is not simply represented as the disintegration of a conjugal family. Rather, divorce is represented more of a projection of the ongoing reconfiguration of Chinese family structure in alignment with the localization of a global middle-class culture, a intimate imagination of which has been circulated through imported films, TV dramas, domestic fiction, interior design magazines and so on. In other words, divorce representations play a key role in projecting and channeling the desire and fantasy of a middle-class domestic culture and in remapping a harmonious and self-contained domestic and psychic interior cut off from both the revolutionary past and the marketplace. Tackling rampant gender-related social problems in contemporary Chinese society, my research also seeks to address the predicaments that divorced women are confronted with in the process of actively negotiating their self-value and gender identity."
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