Reconstructing the gendered subaltern subject: Chinese rural migrant women in literary translation

ABSTRACT

As a significant embodiment of Chinese subalternity, the subject formation of rural migrant women presents the multiple power dynamics emerging in the course of modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation in post-reform China. Northern Girls, a novel written by contemporary Chinese female writer Sheng Keyi, provides a realistic account of survival for this marginalised group of women that is intertwined with class, gender and rural–urban disparities. This paper takes this novel as a case study, exploring how the female subaltern subject is discursively reconstructed through literary translation. Regarding the English translation as part of the transcultural flow of ideas between Western and indigenous Chinese feminisms, this paper examines its translation strategies, demonstrating how gender stereotypes, misogynous discourse, power relations and female agency in a gendered subaltern narration are rewritten in a hegemonic language. The analysis reveals that the English version rearranges the intersectional dynamics of power in post-reform China. While the gendered autonomy and agency are reinforced in the target text, the discursive construction of the Chinese female subaltern is simplified by a hegemonic formation of feminism and modernity that underplays the original ‘reverse discourse’ in non-Western women’s writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• subaltern
• literary translation
• contemporary Chinese literature
• rural migrant women

1. Introduction

Since the late twentieth century, China has experienced the rapid development of urbanisation, foreign investment and the global factory regime as a result of the market-driven national reform. This course of events has shaped a new socialist discursive field where complex power structures interact and new subjects emerge under an accelerated form of modernisation in which social transformations materialise in a compressed manner in terms of both time and space (Pun & Zhang, 2017). The high demand for labour in urban areas has led to a sharp increase in rural migrant workers in the post-reform era. Working on the frontline of industrial production and living in the lower strata of society, Chinese rural migrant workers are highly marginalised in political, economic and cultural terms. Unlike their male counterparts, rural migrant women face a more complex field of power dynamics. They are not only subjected to growing rural-urban disparities, socio-economic inequalities and labour exploitation but also a gendered framework of regulatory forces generated by a moral economy dominated by patriarchal logic (Jacka, 2005; Lee, 1998; Pun, 2005). Despite these institutional and gendered orders of oppression, public discursive spaces in contemporary China, including most rural migrant women’s self-narrative, lack ‘real critique of the discourses and structures that undergird migrant women’s exploitation’(Jacka, 2005, p. 283), which reinforces their marginalised position.

In this context, Chinese female writer Sheng Keyi’s novel Beimei 北妹 (Northern Girls, 2004) is exceptional because it presents a vivid record of Chinese rural migrant women’s struggles from a previously silenced female perspective. As a prominent one among the ‘post-70s’ group of Chinese female writers, Sheng is unique in respect of her subaltern origin and unconventional narration based on self-experience (Schaffer & Song, 2017, p. 5). Before beginning her writing career, she moved from her rural hometown to Shenzhen, the first city of the Special Economic Zones to attract migrant workers in China. At the forefront of China’s economic reform and development, Shenzhen is the epitome of how the subaltern has been impacted by the condensed form of social transformations. Sheng’s own experience as a rural migrant in Shenzhen grounds her writing with a rare insight and vitality, granting the discursive autonomy of the subaltern subject. In Northern Girls, she demonstrates an incisive critique of how the downside of modernity in Shenzhen exploits rural women, reinforces the patriarchal order and maintains social inequalities, which provides a previously absent narrative that moves beyond traditional literary conventions of how rural women are represented. The English version, translated by Shelly Bryant, was published by Penguin Books in 2012. It was also subsequently translated into Russian (2016), Czech (2019) and Polish (2022). Its transnational circulation provides a rare voice from Chinese rural migrant women and participates in the international dialogue on gender, class and modernity through literary translation.

Considering Northern Girls as a life narrative of Chinese gendered subalternity, this article examines how the non-Western female subaltern subject, embedded in the matrices of discourse and power within the socio-historical specificities of post-reform China, is reconstructed in English. Though China’s power now rivals American hegemony, creating hegemonic relations within its own geopolitical sphere, English as a hegemonic language still dominates in the cultural context of literary translation. The following two sections of this article outline a theoretical framework of the discursive (re)construction of the female subject and an overview of Northern Girls and its English translation. The subsequent three sections provide a comparative textual analysis of how gender stereotypes, misogyny, power relations and female agency in this novel are translated into English. The concluding part summarises the observations and identifies a mode of translating the gendered (subaltern) East into a Western context.

2. Discursive (re)construction of the female subject

Using Foucault’s conceptualisation of discourse and power to engage with feminist poststructuralism and (intersectional) feminist translation theories, this study builds an integrated theoretical framework for examining how the female subject is discursively reconstructed in literary translation. As Foucault (1978; 1981) illustrates, discourse is a site of contestation and conflict where power relations emerge, sustain and transform, while it can also reinforce, resist or subvert power. This interaction between discourse and power permeates human society in a dynamic process of change. In this process, the empowered subject positions can be challenged, and the marginalised ones can strive for mainstream positions. Foucault’s theory explains how discursive subjects are constituted through power relations within socio-historical specificities. Emphasising the resistant force of discourse and having the potential to sustain the critical project of empowering marginalised discourses, this theory aligns with feminist standpoints that seek to confront and deconstruct mainstream patriarchal discourse while constructing women’s discursive subject (Sawicki, 1991; Weedon, 1997). Based on Foucault’s framework of discourse and power, Weedon (1997) proposes that the female subject is constantly constructed as ‘a thinking, feeling subject and social agent, capable of resistance and innovations produced out of the clash between contradictory subject positions and practices’ (p. 125) in a dynamic matrix of power relations. In this sense, the female subject in discourse is never static, and its (re)negotiation demonstrates how different mechanisms of power, in the form of dominance, resistance or subversion, grip women at certain points. Since socio-cultural and linguistic boundaries lead to different discursive paradigms in the source and target cultural systems, women’s writing and its translation are two processes through which different constitutions of the female subject emerge from linguistic forms. Translation thereby entails a reconfiguration of meaning and power dynamics and a rewriting of the cultural politics of gender and sexuality.

Acquiring women’s subject positions in discourse is one of the concerns for feminist translation practice and studies. Godard (1990) theorises feminist discourse and translation, arguing that ‘everywhere women are writing their way into subjective agency, dis/placing themselves’ (p. 45), and that feminist writing is interwoven with feminist translation in a way that ‘works upon language, upon the dominant discourse, in a radical interrogation of meaning’ (p. 46). Through challenging and subverting, translation functions as production rather than reproduction, generating new subject positions and rearranging power relations. Converged with the theorisation of the social construction of gender (Butler, 1999), other feminist approaches to translation explore how translation plays a role in removing sexism and misogyny from language, rewriting social stereotypes, mediating cultural differences and empowering sexual minorities (e.g., Federici & Leonardi, 2013; Massardier-Kenney, 2015; Simon, 1996; von Flotow, 1997). While continuing and broadening the endeavour to empower the Other in patriarchal societies, this line of research highlights the cultural and historical contexts in which gender and sexual identities are constructed and scrutinised, thereby allowing more interdisciplinary and intersectional perspectives to emerge.

In terms of translating gendered (subaltern) discourses from a non-Western context into English, intersections between gender and other power differentials based on social divisions such as class, ethnicity and nationality are scrutinised. Highlighting the hegemonic state of English, Spivak (1993) argues for the cultural politics of language and the mission of translation to articulate otherness. She underlines the significance of reproducing the linguistic rhetoricity in non-Western women’s writing, suggesting that a translation produced in the West can further obscure the gendered agency embedded in women’s rhetoricity and create a scene where ‘a species of neocolonialist construction of the non-Western scene is afoot’ (p. 181). Examining how the heterogeneity of the Chinese female subject may be lost in transnational encounters, Shih (2002) argues that translation tends to become an activity of reducing and simplifying, positioning Chinese women in the discursive paradigms of Western-centric universalism, thereby resulting in a transplanted discourse in which ‘the infinitely complex institutional, political, ethnic, class, and gender determinations of Chineseness within China appear by one stroke of the magic wand to be homogenized’ (p. 115). Since Chinese subaltern women are marginalised by gender, class and geopolitical disparities, their discursive reconstruction in the Western context is a more complex process, in which the multiply othered subject is reconfigured within the structural asymmetry of power and different or contradictory discursive frameworks generated in China and the West.

3. Northern Girls and its English translation

The title phrase ‘northern girls’ refers to young rural migrant women from provinces north of Guangdong province, constituting most of the female workforce in Shenzhen. This phrase is usually used in a derogatory sense with connotations of regional disparities and a sexual–moral discourse that regards women from northern backward rural regions as sexualised objects (Sun, 2014, pp. 223–224). The unskilled and uneducated protagonist, Qian Xiaohong, travels from her rural hometown to Shenzhen in search of a better life. She and her friends encounter complex gender and class structures in different workplaces and become enmeshed in a series of knotty situations caused by lustful men who treat them as objects of sexual exploitation and the state power that deprives them of fundamental rights. They are subjected to brutal circumstances, such as forced abortion, sex trade, rape and surrogacy. As a voluptuous young woman, Xiaohong is constantly confronted with the male gaze and desire, but she resolutely guards her dignity and integrity, and her unhampered vitality drives her quest for autonomy and freedom. Combining literary language with everyday speech in rural dialects, Sheng’s unflinching and poignant narration depicts how rural migrant women are othered in the rapidly developing city while resiliently seeking respectable lives.

The publication of Sheng's debut novel Northern Girls in 2004 soon made her a critically acclaimed author in China. Its English version, titled Northern Girls: Life Goes On, was translated by Shelly Bryant, a translator, writer and researcher who also translated Sheng’s other three novels into English. Published by Penguin Books in 2012, Northern Girls was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in the same year, indicating its reception as a notable work of Asian literature in the anglophone sphere. The main research themes of Northern Girls include how the novel reveals female sexuality at the bottom of society, how it represents rural women in a radical way and how it demonstrates Chinese modernity. Sun (2014) illustrates how this novel differs from dominant cultural discourses in China by creating a new sexual–moral economy, and argues that due to its ‘ethnographic nature’ (p. 243), Sheng’s writing should be read as a record of the collective experience of female migrant workers in Shenzhen rather than a(n) (auto)biographical writing about individuals. Taking its transcultural circulation into account, Schaffer and Song (2017) consider Northern Girls as an alternative discourse of China’s road to modernity and the global market, and a text that presents conditions existing in Western countries as well by exposing the downside of global capitalism. They argue that Sheng’s account of social abjection and exploitation reveals a structured marginalising process at a global scale and ‘rupture[s] the optimism of progressive liberal agendas for change’ (p. 22). This perspective draws forth how Northern Girls, a novel written by a contemporary Chinese female writer and translated into several languages, may not only be a unique Chinese story but can also serve as a participant in global debates, addressing issues of subalternity, gender and market-driven economies in a transnational and globalising context. While literary criticism has delved into various aspects of the novel’s themes, issues relating to its translation into English have remained unexplored by previous studies.

This novel, as a female subaltern narration, is stylistically ‘infused with sardonic humour and narrative irony’ (Schaffer & Song, 2014, p. 63). This kind of gendered rhetoricity, as Spivak (1993) argues, is related to ‘social logic, social reasonableness, and the disruptiveness of figuration in social practice’ (p. 187), thereby playing a role in constructing and disrupting the gendered agent in the text. Specifically, Sheng presents the subtlety of female agency and socio-historical complexity through a twofold discursive framework. While depicting rural migrant women as active agents with resistant force from a feminist perspective, Sheng resorts to the male-dominated discourse of misogyny and sexual double standards, utilising it to construct the female subject who breaks through the plights of multiple oppressions and inferior stereotypes, as a stark sarcasm and accusation towards the socio-cultural system. In the present study, this writing is regarded as what Foucault (1978, pp. 101–102) terms as ‘reverse discourse’, a resistant form of discourse that enables the disempowered subject to speak in their own right through the exact discursive framework that disqualifies and marginalises them. As a discursive strategy for reconfiguring power relations, it contains contradictory discourses operating in the same discursive field. In Northern Girls, the male-dominated narrative and the narrative embodying female subjectivities coexist contradictorily and strategically. Their combination forms a resistant type of women’s writing that challenges power and meaning by presenting the discourse of exploitation and oppression while speaking for the women who live in it. Therefore, the analysis of the source text (Sheng, 2011 [2004]) and the target text (Sheng, 2015 [2012]) will also be twofold, revealing how the new and resistant discourse of female agency is translated and how its opposing form, the dominant form that asserts the former’s subordination, is translated. Specifically, the following sections will probe into the rendering of gender stereotypes and misogyny, the power dynamics that Chinese rural migrant women are embroiled in and the female agency emerging from Sheng’s unconventional account of the gendered subalternity. Moreover, regarding this novel as part of the transcultural flow between Western and indigenous Chinese feminisms, the analysis will also reveal how the asymmetrical relations of power reinforce the hegemonic formation of feminism and modernity through literary translation into English.

4. Translating gender stereotypes and misogyny

As mentioned in the previous section, gender stereotypes and misogynous discourse in Northern Girls embody the power that the female writing as reverse discourse seeks to subvert. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator sketches the contours of Xiaohong’s appearance and provides a general characterisation of this female protagonist. She is described as ‘嫁个男人安分守己生儿育女的坯子’ [a typical one who will marry a man, bear sons and daughters and never overstep the boundaries]¹ (ST, p. 1), which presents the long-lasting stereotype of women’s duties and moral discipline in China, especially in rural areas, where family patriarchy strictly confines women by ‘expectations surrounding marriage, norms of gender propriety, and popular stereotypes associating women’s mobility with immorality’ (Gaetano & Jacka, 2004, p. 5). In the English version, this description is rewritten as ‘the sort of girl a guy wouldn’t mind taking home to meet his parents’(TT, p. 1). In contrast to the source text, the original gender double standards are mitigated with a general ‘good girlfriend’ description. The power structure of patriarchal traditions and social codes of behaviours that restrict rural Chinese women with gender-based standards and construct their subject positions of inferiority are reduced.

Moreover, the narrator ironically presents other stereotyped characteristics linked with femininity. For example, ‘女人真多事’ [women are really meddlesome] (ST, p. 64) is rendered into ‘a woman’s life is never easy’ (TT, p. 80), which replaces a derogatory description of women with the hardship of women’s lives, as a contrast to the original meaning. Similarly, ‘毕竟闲聊才是女人的天职’ [after all, gossiping is women’s vocation] (ST, p. 194) is another stereotyped view of how women are associated with gossip and talkativeness; this sentence is omitted in the target text. It is evident that the translation tends to remove or rewrite the stereotyped discourse of female characteristics constructed in a misogynous discursive framework, presenting the image of women in a more positive way.

As a cultural construction arising at almost the same time as patriarchy, misogyny includes the hatred and prejudice against women through utterance, attitude and behaviour, taking shape in various forms, such as sexual objectification, sexual violence, emotional abuse and institutional neglect (Gilmore, 2010; Manne, 2018). Ubiquitous in any patriarchal culture, it reinforces the subordinate position of women through devaluing feminine characteristics and women’s social values. In the Chinese context, prevalent in the profit-driven media, rural migrant women are constructed and reinforced as sexualised objects (Sun, 2014; Zheng, 2009), and their real-life experiences are usually intertwined with the commodification of the female body (Fu, 2009; Jacka, 2005; Yan, 2008). As a result of the juxtaposition of class and gender oppressions, female characters are constantly confronted with various forms of misogyny in this novel. The narrator presents some coarse sexual fantasies that demonstrate male obscenity and sexual violence. However, most of them are omitted in the English version. For example:

ST: 他们幻想成为花，自在地插入钱小红这个妖艳的花瓶里，然后散漫地东倒西歪，用身体去蹂躏钱小红，就像狗在草地上打滚，或者粗暴地将它击碎，获取那碎裂的动听。(p. 7)

[They imagined that they could become flowers, inserting into Qian Xiaohong, this coquettish vase, and leisurely reeling right and left. They wanted to ravage Qian Xiaohong, like dogs rolling on a grassland, or to roughly crush it, gaining that pleasant sound of splintering.]

TT: (deleted)

The above excerpt is narrated from the male characters’ point of view, which ‘inevitably represents the female as the object of the male gaze’ (Mills, 1995, p. 146). It presents how Xiaohong is fantasied about as a sexual object and a locus for sexual violence, which deems the female body as suitable for the revelry of lust and masculinity. This narration demonstrates how ‘an exploitative body culture of hypermasculine consumption’ (Schaffer & Song, 2014, p. 68) is presented in female writing as an opposing discourse that underpins the subordination and sexualisation of women. By removing this male-focalised narration that embodies explicit misogyny and gender-based violence, the sexualised plight of rural migrant women is attenuated in the target text, and the opposing discursive framework that the female writing intends to subvert becomes absent. In addition, several episodes of sexual harassment are also deleted in the target text. The following is an example:

ST: 光天化日下，在胸前摸一把，然后惊慌逃窜，也不知这猪日的获得了什么。这地方真乱，要是晚间，说不定还会遇到强奸了。 (p. 32)

[In broad daylight, (he) touched (my) breasts and then fled in panic. (I) wonder what this bastard has gained. It is indeed a messy place, and if it were late at night, (I) might have even gotten raped.]

TT: (deleted)

From Xiaohong’s point of view, this excerpt demonstrates a situation of sexual harassment and the potential danger of rape that a woman may encounter late at night. As a forceful manifestation of misogyny, the behaviour of men in harassment and assault occurs frequently in Chinese rural migrant women’s lives within industrial workplaces and personal domains (Hershatter, 2007; Jacka, 2005). However, in the target text, the unsafe and misogynous situation that rural migrant women live in is underplayed as the result of the deletion, and the female experience of infringement and exploitation is simplified. Furthermore, the misogynous context of the gendered subaltern not only includes how rural migrant women are sexualised and eroticised in an amoral way but also involves how men devalue them in other aspects, for example:

ST: 他哪一方面配起钱小红来不是绰绰有余，这小娘们居然还高傲成这样。(p. 265)

[He was more than enough to be matched with Qian Xiaohong in any way, but this little bitch was actually arrogant like this.]

TT: (deleted)

This sentence demonstrates a typical attitude of urban men towards rural migrant women. Although sexually desiring ‘northern girls’, they hardly treat them as dignified social agents. Holding a resentful attitude towards Xiaohong, the male character devalues her through derogatory slang and highlights their disparities in the socio-economic sense. This narration is also omitted in the target text, and the original misogynous discourse is further attenuated.

Besides explicit misogynous discourse, this novel also presents subaltern women by depicting beauty that objectifies the female subject. As Jeffreys (2005) illustrates, images and social practices that construct and highlight female beauty are manifestations of how cultural misogyny maintains the inferiority of women in a male-dominant society. In Northern Girls, subaltern women’s physical appearance is attached with utmost importance, and beauty is craved as an embodiment of personal value. When describing the posture of a female character falling asleep, the narrator contrasts it with an image of a sexualised beauty: ‘全无美女入睡的诱人’ [all without the allure of a beautiful woman falling asleep] (ST, p. 30). This depiction presents a stereotyped and fetishised image of ‘beauty’ constructed by the male gaze. Comparatively, the translation renders it as a narration without gender indication: ‘there was no evidence of that lack of self-consciousness that marks the face of one in a deep slumber’ (TT, p. 40). Deviating from the original discursive framework, this alteration removes the fetishised process that reinforces the objectified position of women, downplaying the original misogynistic tone.

The examples above demonstrate that the English translation alters the original gendered discourse, resorting to strategies that are in line with feminist translation approaches that tend to ‘correct’ or ‘undermine’ the source texts by removing or altering narratives of the male gaze, gender stereotypes and misogyny (von Flotow, 1997, pp. 24–27). The new discourse attenuates the sexualised state and stereotyped characteristics of rural migrant women and reduces accounts of their predicaments. As a result, although the target text presents the female subaltern subject partly outside the misogynous discursive framework, it also underplays the ironic tone of Sheng’s reverse discourse. By presenting the misogynous environment with powerful and explicit language, Sheng delineates the harsh reality that rural migrant women encounter, and through her reverse discourse, the novel is presented with a confronting stance and critical accusation against reality. Through reducing the explicitly misogynistic tone of the narrator and mitigating the male-dominated discourse, this gendered rhetoricity that underpins Sheng’s gritty account of the female subaltern is lost in the English translation as a result.

5. Translating power relations

As Pun (2005, p. 4) argues, rural migrant women in post-reform China are subjected to the structural violence resulting from the juxtaposition of threefold oppressions by patriarchy, state socialism and global capitalism. In Northern Girls, Shenzhen is demonstrated as a city of dreams denoting hope and opportunities and also a place governed by greed, corruption and promiscuity that exploit subaltern women in multiple dimensions. Their subject-making journey in the rapid modernising progress is marked by how they live through these power relations that constantly marginalise and oppress them.

Throughout the novel, rural migrant women are entangled in several emotional and sexual relationships with urban men. Constructed by the hegemonic discourses of rurality and sexuality, the gendered power relation between these two groups is commonly based on dual stereotypes of how young rural women are supposed to be ‘docile virgins’ and ‘promiscuous whores’ at the same time (Zheng, 2004, p. 106). They are expected to be obedient as productive workers and sexually approachable as objects of exploitation. In Northern Girls, Mazi is the man that helps Xiaohong leave her hometown and find jobs in Shenzhen. While acknowledging and valuing Xiaohong’s feminine charms, Mazi expects Xiaohong to be obedient and dutiful. However, Xiaohong behaves in a defiant way that is inconsistent with his anticipation:

ST: 李麻子物色钱小红，就是看她风骚妩媚，没想到钱小红还有些血气方刚，长些小刺，不太好控制。 (p. 30)

[Li Mazi selected Qian Xiaohong because she was flirtatious and charming, but he didn’t expect that Qian Xiaohong was a bit hot-blooded and had some small thorns, not easy to control.]

TT: He had hand-picked Xiaohong upon seeing her coquettish charms, never suspecting she had such a hot-blooded, independent streak in her. (p. 40)

In the source text,‘不太好控制’ [not easy to control] forms a transitivity structure, which, according to Mills (1995), is a crucial stylistic feature that demonstrates how power relations are represented in literary language by indicating what role a human agent plays and how powerful they are, ‘[telling] us a great deal about the ideological messages which circulate in texts where there are strong heroines and where there are passive victims’ (p. 116). The transitivity system in this verbal phrase demonstrates an evident power relation, in which Mazi, as the actor of ‘control’, dominates this action process, while the female character is the affected object in a passive position. The translation deletes this transitivity system and replaces it with ‘independent streak’ as a characterisation of Xiaohong, downplaying this power relation and pointing out Xiaohong’s active agency of being independent. This alteration reverses the passive position of the female character and reconstructs the female subject outside the discursive field of unequal gendered power relations.

As narrated in this novel, the lives of ‘northern girls’ are also affected by socialist state power, mainly manifested through the coerced enforcement of abortion and sterilisation as part of China’s family planning policies. In the late twentieth century, the government set specific birth-planning goals to limit the burgeoning population by regulating the number of children a family can have, and specific measures of birth control were strictly enforced around the country (Attane, 2002). Lacking education on reproductive health, many rural migrant women experienced coercive abortion and sterilisation, sometimes resulting in devastating consequences for their physical and psychological health (Nie, 2005). This manifestation of state power demonstrates how the female body is regulated for national regimes and collective interests. Northern Girls presents how female characters go through abortions and sterilisation on suspicion of evading the family planning scheme. For example:

ST: 正常情况下都是扎女的，女的确实有病不能结扎的，男人就不可逃避地要挨一刀。(p. 208)

[The normal circumstance was to tie the woman. If the woman was really sick and could not do the ligation, the man would inevitably go under the knife.]

TT: Normally, the woman would have a tubal ligation, hysterectomy or some other method of sterilization. If the woman was really not able to do so, the man have to pay the price and go under the knife. (pp. 243–244)

In the source text, ‘正常情况下都是扎女的’ [the normal circumstance was to tie the woman] indicates the action of coercive sterilisation on women. The verb ‘扎’ is the second character of the Chinese word ‘结扎’ [ligation], which literally means ‘tie’, as a colloquial expression of ligation. In this sentence, it forms a transitivity system, where the implicit actor of the action process is the operating doctor, and ‘the woman’ serves as the passive object affected by the action. This demonstrates the power relation emerging in the enforced female sterilisation procedure, where the female is the passive recipient of action due to state power, whose body is regulated with a permanent measure and whose subjectivity is eliminated. Changed into ‘normally, the woman would have a tubal ligation, hysterectomy or some other method of sterilization’ in the target text, ‘the woman’ is positioned as the subject of the sentence, and the predicate ‘have’ downplays her passive state, even though she is still the object of the sterilisation action. Since only doctors and textbooks would use these clinical terms, transforming colloquialism into them also obscures the everyday class speech of the narrator, downplaying the class and gender position of subaltern women in the face of the state’s regulatory force. Moreover, the translation avoids the generic expressions of ‘扎’ [tie] or ‘结扎’ [ligation] that denote the surgical procedure of either male or female in this context, and replaces them with the specific female surgical methods. This alteration differentiates female experiences from the general medical procedures for both sexes, highlighting the female role in enforcing the family planning policy. In summary, while underlining the feminised experience, through the transitivity alteration and the omission of colloquialism, the English translation reconstructs the discursive position of the female and the female body, downplaying the state nation’s regulatory force and rural migrant women’s class position in the face of the coercive sterilisation.

As part of the workforce in the industrialised Special Economic Zone, female migrant workers are subjected to highly intense and repetitive work on factory production lines. Imagined as more obedient and tolerant than male counterparts, female workers are regulated by disciplinary techniques in the workplace, and the female body becomes the site where industrialised and productive labour can be extracted (Pun, 2005). This female experience of labour exploitation in the grid of power and discipline is also depicted in Northern Girls. For example:

ST: 要不是阿军，她就看不到那招聘广告，看不到广告，就去不了千山宾馆，就得继续忍受平胸的显摆，在囚牢里机器人一样地干活。(p. 104)

[Had it not been for Ah Jun, she would never have seen the job advertisement, and in that case, she would never have left for Qianshan Hotel and would have had to continue to put up with Runway’s showing off, working like a robot in the jail.]

TT: Had it not been for Ah Jun, she would never have seen the job ad and would have had to continue to put up with Runway’s showing off. (p. 126)

The narrator describes Xiaohong's experience of working in the factory as ‘在囚牢里机器人一样地干活’ [working like a robot in the jail], indicating the harsh working condition in the factory and how female migrant workers are exploited as production machines and routinised labours. However, this figurative expression of the female experience in the factory is omitted in the target text. As a result, the power relation and torturous reality that rural migrant women face in the industrial workplace are underplayed, and the female subject as a victim of labour exploitation is not reproduced in the English version.

6. Translating female agency

In this novel, rural migrant women are constructed not only as degraded, marginalised and sexualised subjects due to gender and rural identities, but also as female subjects with agency, autonomy and resistance. Facing a range of inequalities, they make choices and have pursuits even in their darkest plights, positively pursuing better lives in this patriarchal order. Although oppressed by multiple forces, the protagonist Xiaohong seeks an alternative female agency, which is defiant in the context of male chauvinism and libidinal impulse and absent in mainstream Chinese cultural politics.

In her rural hometown, Xiaohong experiences poverty, sexual harassment and humiliating gossip, determining to start a new life elsewhere. Before leaving for Shenzhen, she works in a hair salon and talks about her anticipation of a better material life and romantic relationships in the big city:

ST: 那要勤快点洗脑壳啰！新衣服会有的，面包会有的，男人也会有的。(p. 20)

[Then we should wash heads diligently! There’ll be new clothes, there’ll be bread, and there’ll be men too.]

TT: ‘We’ve got to wash tons of scalps first but then there’ll be plenty of new clothes, plenty of good food and plenty of men to choose from too.’ (p. 28)

As socio-economically marginalised individuals, rural migrant women’s ‘right to intimacy’ is normally ‘at best contingent, conditional, and vulnerable to violation and exploitation’ (Sun, 2022, p. 124), and this is also consistent with most of the female experience narrated in this novel. Holding optimistic views, Xiaohong pictures a possible bright future in which dignified men could bring her intimate relationships with romance and mutual respect, rather than with oppression and androcentrism. Supplementing ‘男人’ [men] in the source text with an action ‘to choose from’, the target text constructs the subject position of the female protagonist and renders her initiative in gender relations explicit. In this way, subaltern women are discursively presented with autonomy and active agency, which are normally absent in the popular narratives that depict them as stereotypically subordinated and abject subjects passively waiting for urban men’s good graces. The explicit discourse of their making choices and decisions about intimacy redraws the sexual–moral dynamics embedded in the identity construction of ‘northern girls’.

Arriving in Shenzhen, Xiaohong realises that this city contrasts with her imagination. The rural identity poses troubles in her daily life. Predicaments, such as the lack of urban resident permits, prevent her from settling down. In the course of seeking help for legal identity, Xiaohong finds that the men in power are manipulative and domineering, and they treat her like nothing more than an object of sexual exploitation. Her body becomes a valuable asset and the shortcut to acceptance by this modernised city:

ST: 我想少走点弯路，哪个晓得，村长这头种猪，只认处女膜！就算是处女，老子也不搭这根筋！ (p. 28)

[I wanted to take a shortcut, but who knew that this rutting pig mayor only cares about the hymen! Even if being a virgin, laozi wouldn’t take this route! ]

TT: ‘I thought we could take a shortcut and get right to the ocean. How was I to know the bloody mayor only cared about popping a girl’s cherry? Even if I were a virgin, I would never take this route to get what I want.’ (p. 38)

This excerpt is taken from a scene where Xiaohong seeks help from the mayor for a temporary residence card. After realising the mayor’s kindness is only based on depriving a young woman of her virginity, she is irritated by the humiliation and firmly rejects this route. In Chinese, ‘老子’ [laozi], which means ‘old man’ or ‘father’, is a colloquial expression normally used by a man to refer to himself in an arrogant, condescending or furious way. When used by women, this word functions to stress authority and empower female speech, presenting how a patriarchal notion is internalised in the Chinese language. This displaced usage demonstrates how gender, as a ‘doing, an incessant activity performed’ (Butler, 2004, p. 1), discursively constructs an alternative subject and interferes with power dynamics. In the source text, adopting this word to refer to herself, Xiaohong assumes male discourse to convey autonomy. In the target text, this word is rendered as ‘I’, and the performed masculinity is removed from the female speech. While the original gendered power dynamics are underplayed, in effect, the absence of patriarchal language renders Xiaohong’s speech more assertive as female discourse and her resistant agency more solid as female power, rather than an unstable one in the mask of male authority. Furthermore, ‘wouldn’t take this route’ is supplemented as ‘would never take this route to get what I want’. The translation underlines Xiaohong’s subjectivity through an adverb used for emphasis (‘never’) and verbs demonstrating an action process (‘get’) and a mental process (‘want’). In this way, the worldview of Xiaohong becomes more evident, and the tone of her speech is rendered more assertive and resolute. These additions position the female character as the agent of more complex behaviours and mindsets. In this circumstance where a powerful man demeans a subaltern woman, the assertive denial constitutes female power in the form of resistance, and in the English translation, this resistance is intensified.

Post-reform China is characterised by the proliferation of female bodily images and sexual discourses, while female desire finds little expression in cultural values and dominant discourses (Croll, 1995; Evans, 1997). In Northern Girls, Xiaohong is on a journey of seeking an alternative sexual agency, which deviates from the traditional one that subordinates the subaltern female body, silences female sexual desire and constrains sexual freedom. She actively embraces her physical desire, regarding it as a natural trait without shame, and constantly defends her own brand of integrity. Even though the disparities in socio-economic status exist in relationships, she asserts the sexual equality between men and women with no concessions:

ST: 我不是你的妓女你不是嫖客，你也没有强奸我，所以不存在我吃亏的道理。(p. 198)

[I am not your prostitute, you are not a john, and you didn’t rape me, so there is no reason why I should lose out.]

TT: ‘I’m not a prostitute. You’re not my customer and you didn’t rape me. I don’t see how you can say I lost out, especially not if I enjoyed it as much as you did.’ (p. 231)

This example is part of a conversation between Xiaohong and a man after their sexual intercourse. The man comments that as an unmarried rural girl, Xiaohong inevitably loses out in their sexual relationship. Xiaohong denies this and defends her active position: since she does it for the enjoyment of sex rather than as part of a trade or in a victimised context, there is no difference between herself and the man in terms of gain and loss. In the target text, this refuting speech is translated with the addition of ‘especially not if I enjoyed it as much as you did’, which asserts sexual agency to a sexual partner and transforms the female body from the desired object to a desiring subject. The translation underlines Xiaohong’s mind-state in enjoying sex and her attempt to evoke an equal relationship with the man in the sexual domain, and constructs the power and agency of the subaltern female body. In this way, the female body not only breaks away from the objectified and commodified state but also becomes a site emancipating the woman from the hegemonic gender culture. As a result, the sexual–moral parameters of the existing power structures in contemporary China that this writing intends to subvert are further reconfigured.

7. Conclusion

This study examines the English translation of Northern Girls, a novel presenting rural migrant women’s struggles in the context of the modernisation progress and the enlarging social inequalities in post-reform China. Depicting a marginalised and previously silenced group, Sheng Keyi, as a unique one among Chinese female writers, provides a valuable literary discourse in which an alternative female subaltern subject emerges. Its English translation, considered as a rewriting of intersectional dynamics of power, reconfigures the gendered subalternity in several dimensions.

Gender stereotypes and misogyny are aspects that particularly present how Sheng’s writing is a form of reverse discourse, since sexist views and the male gaze are precisely the factors that this female writing intends to criticise and subvert. Comparatively, the English translation omits some narrations that eroticise, objectify or devalue women in terms of corporeal being and social values, while attenuating expressions of traditional gender stereotypes. It could be concluded that the translation strategies are in line with feminist perspectives, tending to remove misogyny, downplay the oppressed and passive position of women and highlight the female subjectivity. Nevertheless, this reproduction is achieved by attenuating the reverse discourse of Sheng’s writing. While the new and resistant female subaltern subject is constructed as more assertive and powerful, its opposing form, the dominant discourse that marginalises subaltern women, embodied in Sheng’s stark realism and ironic style, is downplayed to a great extent.

As a feminist subaltern narration that challenges public discourses of rural migrant women in contemporary China, Northern Girls exposes and critiques the multiple power dynamics in the urban industrial context. It portrays the protagonist Xiaohong as a brave and independent woman pursuing autonomy and sexual freedom. When the female subaltern experience in the text is depicted in a realistic and poignant style as part of the reverse discourse, the target text tends to attenuate narrations of the unequal gendered power relation, the regulatory force of the state power and the disciplinary regulations in the industrial workplace. As a result, the triple oppressions that Chinese rural migrant women encounter are underplayed, and the female power is constructed in a new discursive framework. As for the reconstruction of female (sexual) agency, the translation enriches the characterisation of Xiaohong by supplementing her worldview and amplifying her active agency and resistant power. Thematically, the translation strategies seemingly follow the feminist steps of the source text by presenting an alternative story of Chinese rural migrant women, but in effect, it paradoxically obscures the gendered rhetoricity embedded in the reverse discourse in the Chinese source text by simplifying the experience of the female subaltern and downplaying the discourse of exploitation and oppression that constructs the original female subject.

This literary translation demonstrates that the gendered subalternity in Northern Girls, as a resistant discourse that challenges the dominant patriarchal ideologies, is altered and reconstructed by a universal mode of Western feminism and modernity. Wielding the hegemonic power of the English language in the global literary field and the asymmetrical relations of power between Chinese and Western discursive fields of women’s issues and feminisms, the English translation intervenes in the discourse of the Chinese female subaltern, attenuating the gendered rhetoricity and the oppressions and plights that configure the non-Western female subject. Therefore, this translation could be regarded as a modality of simplification: while being rendered as less subordinated, less sexualised and less objectified, the female subject also becomes less ‘Chinese subaltern’. Although the English translation is also a form of resistance against the patriarchal discourse, this resistance is based on fraying the resistant form of the original Chinese female life narrative. As a result, while a Western feminist reading of the target text will see the translation as a ‘correct’ form of resistance, it in effect obscures the complex social and historical formation in a non-Western context, rearranges the power dynamics and reproduces the female subject partly outside the discursive paradigms of the source culture.

Disclosure statement

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

Note on contribution

Yijia Dong is a PhD candidate in translation studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include gender and translation, Chinese literature in translation, and translation and soft power.

Notes

1 The English translations in square brackets which follow the STs are all done by the author. They are provided for informative purposes, thereby more literal than what a polished English translation ready for publication would be.