“I’m not a feminist, but … ”: Hegemonic femininities and women’s autonomy revisited in a Chinese university

ABSTRACT

In recent years, much academic and public attention has been drawn to a “feminist awakening” in China and its domestic backlashes, especially in popular media and internet forums. Moving from the online waves of women’s agitation to real-world interactions, how do young women in urban China today understand feminism in their everyday lives? To what extent are they scrutinizing their personal experiences with what they understand as “feminist principles,” and how do they reconcile expectations and challenges from the family, school, and workplace? As my interlocutors’ experiences and narratives indicate, urban Chinese women with high educational attainments are less likely to identify with submissive female roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. However, their attitudes toward the new motto of women’s autonomy are at least equally ambivalent. Situating individual life experiences within a broader theoretical discussion on hegemonic femininities, I seek to provide a nuanced look into such ambivalence by illustrating how my interlocutors approximate multiple, sometimes contradicting, frameworks of “ideal womanhood” in narrating their hopes and dilemmas. Moreover, I suggest the “sidestepping feminism” narrative deserves more serious scholarly attention as it may open up new possibilities for enriching and theorizing women’s studies in the Chinese context.

ABSTRACT IN CHINESE

近年来，对性别议题的学术与公众讨论开始越来越多地关注到新一轮的中国女性主义浪潮及其遭受的攻讦。当相关话题在中国互联网尤其是社交媒体上反复出现时，年轻一代的中国城市女性如何在日常生活中思考和践行“女性主义”？这些新的思潮又在何种程度上重塑着她们对个人成长经历的反思以及对亲密关系和个人事业的选择？本文并不试图提供对这些问题的全景式解读，而是以十三位来自北京某大学的女性经历作为切入点，思考“回避女性主义”的叙事策略对当前理论化女性研究的意义。笔者将这种叙事策略置于对三种相互竞争的“霸权式女性气质”的解读中，提出将一种新的女性主义叙事视为对这些拥有不同内在立场并时常相互矛盾的女性气质的挑战，同时解释为何对谈者时常在不同的“理想女性形象”之间进行选择与拼接。

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist anthropology
• intimacy
• hegemonic femininities
• higher education
• urban China

KEYWORDS:

• 女性主义人类学
• 亲密关系
• 霸权式女性气质
• 高等教育
• 城市中国

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Nancy J. Smith-Hefner and all participants at the Graduate Conference on Global Intimacies, Boston University, for inspiring many preliminary thoughts in this article. I am also indebted to Robert P. Weller, Kimberly A. Arkin, Yichuan Zhou, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on various earlier drafts. Last but not least, this research would have been impossible without trust and encouragement from my interlocutors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xuyi Zhao

Xuyi ZHAO (she/her/hers) is an urban ethnographer broadly interested in gender, (im)mobility, temporality, and the state. Currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at Boston University, Xuyi studied political science at Peking University for her undergraduate degree and obtained an MPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Cambridge. Email: [email protected]