Gender in China: A New Forum An Interview with Harriet Zurndorfer
During the last decade there has been an increasingly growing interest in issues of gender among scholars of traditional China, both in China and abroad. Thanks to the work of Patricia Ebrey, Dorothy Ko, and Susan Mann, we now have a roughly continuous narrative (in English) of the history of Chinese women from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries. Studies have appeared and continue to appear about gender in the medical and the legal discourses, about women's literature and the literary representation of women, about the role of gender in the division of labour and in the conceptualization of sexuality. This new interest in gender among scholars of China has now yet a new arena, 'Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China', a journal published by Brill.
By GIOVANNI VITIELLO
The first issue appeared in March of this year featured three articles: David Keightley provides a survey of the archaeological and inscriptional evidence on the status of women in China from the neolithic to the late Shang dynasty (ca. 50001045 BC); Maram Epstein proposes to view gender as ingrained in the very poetics of the 18th century masterpiece The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng); and Paola Zamperini examines the new meanings the traditional courtesan comes to acquire with the collapse of the imperial order. This first issue also features a review article, by Clara Ho, on eight bibliographies concerning Chinese women published in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong during the last four years, and a number of book reviews about Chinese and English recent releases. The journal is edited in co-operation with Glen Dudbridge (Great Britain), Beata Grant (USA), Clara Ho (Hong Kong), Angela Leung (Taiwan), Susan Mann, and Paul Ropp (USA) by Harriet Zurndorfer, professor of Chinese history at the Sinological Institute of Leiden University. And it is here at the Sinological Institute that I have come to talk with her about Nan Nü.Giovanni Vitiello (GV): How did this journal start?
Harriet Zurndorfer (HZ): There are two sources for it. The first was a workshop we had here in Leiden in September '96, which was sponsored by the IIAS and the Faculty of Letters of Leiden University. This was the first occasion in Europe for European and Asian senior and junior scholars who worked on topics related to women and gender in imperial China to have the opportunity to meet and exchange information in a formal setting. The response from both the participants and the outside was so positive that it struck me that there was quite a strong interest in the subject, that there should be more than just having an occasional workshop. The second source of stimulus was the fact that as an editor of one journal (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient) and as a member of the Board of Editors of T'oung Pao, I receive a certain number of manuscripts every year related to women and gender. And, as we all know, it is very difficult to get one's work published these days quickly, and there are not too many journals focusing on pre-twentieth century topics for the China community to publish in.
GV: How would you describe Nan Nü?
HZ: It's a multidisciplinary journal; so, we focus on disciplines within the study of China, anything from history, literature, art history, anthropology, music, medicine, and, of course, sexuality: whatever is relevant to the study of men, women and gender.
GV: Nan Nü covers a huge chronological stretch, from the beginning of Chinese civilization to 1911....
HZ: Actually 1911 is not exactly the cut-off date we get to the May Fourth Movement, which can be stretched into the end of the 1920's. We decided to use this as a cut-off date because there was a certain way of life that had continuity in a sense, among women as well as among men, in that long space of time, from the earliest times until the real radical breaks occurring in the 20th century. But I can imagine that, in ten years, more and more will be known about men, women and gender in China before the 20th century, and that there might be a Nan Nü for early China, another Nan Nü for mid- to late imperial China it depends how the field progresses...
GV: Most of the work done on gender in China so far has focused on the so-called 'early modern' period (1000-1800), especially the stretch corresponding to the last two dynasties (Ming and Qing: 1368-1911), while other periods remain barely touched by research. Judging from the submissions to Nan Nü, is this trend changing?
HZ: At the moment, if I look at vol. 2, then the era of Ming and Qing is definitely in the minority: we have another article on early China (on wet-nurses), another one on widows in the Zuozhuan (ca. 4th cent. BC), another on a Song woman scholar.... it varies. I think the point is that China scholars are still putting bits and pieces together. There has not yet been a broad sweep of the history of women, for example, like Olwen Hufton has done, writing a series of volumes on all aspects of the history of women, of all classes, all countries, both Eastern and Western Europe....
GV: When would you say that the interest in gender within Chinese studies started, and how has it developed?
HZ: First of all, if you want to go back to origins, I think that there are differences in regard to different disciplines, but for example, in the field of history it all was related to the critique of the 'model Chinese' family which emerged in historical studies of China in the Western academy, and became a hot topic already in the early 80s. A number of graduate students and younger scholars were interested in using the kind of family studies that had been done for Europe, and even Japan, on China, and see if there was a more systematic way to explain the nature of family organization in China, and not just the stereotype of it, but differences according to places, to time, and so on. And that kind of work was done in the early 80s, in the United States and Europe. Patricia Ebrey was probably the one who made the transition from family to women, also already in the early 80s. So, the interest in gender issues within Western sinology has about twenty years of history. In China, of course, it goes way back, to the 20s and 30s, when there was an enormous concern with women's issues (Dorothy Ko brings that up very clearly in her book.) But since the 80s there seems to have been a new interest in women studies in China as a field in its own right, not so much as a by-product of labour studies. Before then, my understanding is that the Women's Federation in China was preoccupied with women's labour in all forms, while in the 80s the history of women became an academic subject. By the time of the Beijing Women's Conference in '95, women studies was already extremely well organized. We have a review article in the first issue (by Clara Ho) which goes into the work that has been done in China in the last thirty years. But to go back to your question, I think in the literary field it has a completely different set of origins. I think it has to do with the development of literary theory, which has grown out of post-colonial discourses, the idea of the Other, etc....
GV: Does Nan Nü have a comparative interest?
HZ: To be honest, I'd say no. What we are trying to do is to get into the depth of the Chinese documentation on gender up to this century. On the other hand, Nan Nü features a relatively large book review section, mainly Chinese books, and because these reviews are written in English, we will make information about what Chinese scholars in China are doing available to people who cannot read Chinese. This was a very important point of the Nan Nü plan, and it still continues to be: we are trying to keep one third of each issue devoted to book-reviews, so we can bring to the attention of the public what is being published in China (inclusive Taiwan and Hong Kong.) In the next issue, coming out in September, all the reviews are about Chinese books.
GV: What kind of audience do you think Nan Nü will reach?
HZ: When I put the idea together, my publisher asked me this same question. My answer is the same now as it was then: that it is my impression that scholars from many different fields are now interested in the question of women and gender, and there is not enough forum. The reader of Nan Nü is the same reader of T'oung Pao or the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. It is somebody who might have studied something else, and who then became interested in women and gender, such as the case with most people who are in the Editorial Board. We all come from different backgrounds history, literature, history of medicine, philosophy but all realized that gender could add a new dimension to our work. *
References
Ebrey, Patricia,
The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993
Ko, Dorothy,
Teachers of the Inner Chambers:
Women and Culture in Seventeenth Century China,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994
Mann, Susan,
Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997
Widmer, Ellen and
Kang-i Sun Chang (eds),
Writing Women in Late Imperial China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997
Zurndorfer, Harriet (ed.),
Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives,
Leiden: Brill, 1999
For further information on Nan Nü, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China please contact:
DR HARRIET ZURNDORFER
Managing Editor
E-mail: zurndorf@let.leidenuniv.nl
Dr Giovanni Vitiello, Assistant Professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, was an IIAS Affiliated Fellow from June 4 to July 31, 1999.
E-mail: vitiello@hawaii.edu