CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Ristivojevic, Dusica |
|---|---|
| Title | Gender and Internationalization in China: The Case of Nuxue bao (1898) |
| Summary | This project is about the initial phase of China’s positioning in the modern world order. It is about the Wuxu reforms (1898), a historical juncture when neo/Confucian elite tried to position the Chinese Empire more favorably within the symbolic and political hierarchies of the modern world. Differing from earlier reforming efforts, 1898 intellectuals opted for social change that would entail a wider embrace of foreign ideas and ideals; differing from iconoclastic modernizing ideologies and political visions of republican revolutionaries and the adherents of New Culture and May Fourth movements, the reformers active in the final years of the nineteenth century tried to enhance China’s international standing by reinterpreting and reinvigorating cultural and socio-political cannons and practices of China’s present and past. In their calling for gradual but systematic change of Chinese society, intellectual elites leading the Wuxu reforms considered the change of women’s position as necessary step towards China’s strengthening, thus providing the space for the entrance of Chinese women as both objects and subjects of the public debates and activities. My dissertation investigates the Wuxu reform movement through the prism of women’s direct participation in the debates and actions pointed to the improvement of China’s and Chinese women’s socio-political conditions. I analyze historically unprecedented emergence and operation of three women-oriented reformist projects – the association The Society for Women’s Learning (Nüxue hui), the journal Chinese Girls’ Progress (Nüxue bao) and the Girls’ School (Nüxue tang) - as a key for understanding the crucial role that gender has played within the processes of social changes in China in general, and within the reform movement of late-Qing period in particular. Despite the inherent historical uncertainties related to the authorship, I use Nüxue bao as the central source for an investigation of the ways in which women used the agendas of the Wuxu reforms to conceptualize and actualize historically unprecedented opportunities to organize and act as recognized legitimate socio-political actors. In the dissertation, I read the texts and actions ascribed to reform-oriented women within (neo)Confucian interpretative framework which informed socio-cultural and political discourses and practices of late-Qing elites. I argue that the process of formation of collective political identity of women and the discursive struggles over its past, present and future defining boundaries, content and meanings reveal the focal role that multiple destabilizations of the relationships between nei (inner) and wai (outer) spheres played in proposed and/or practiced social changes in late-Qing China. Focusing on Nüxue bao, my thesis will show that a redefinition of the relationships between nei and wai spheres, spatio-symbolic notions crucial for both gender roles and for cultural and socio-political ordering of the world defined by Imperial China, facilitated and got facilitated by women’s organizing, theorizing and acting for social change. |
| Supervisor | Cerwonka, Allaine |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/gphrid01.pdf |
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