Abject Modern Girls in Early-twentieth-century China

• Event Date: Thursday, March 8, 2007
• Time: 7:00 pm (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Talk

Department of History
Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History Plenary Address

Tze-Lan Deborah Sang
Associate Professor of Chinese Literature, University of Oregon

Are modern girls always already abject? The emergence of a new kind of female subject—the modern girl—in early-twentieth-century China has been widely documented by both fictional and non-fictional sources. Moreover, it is suggested that the modern girl was often an embattled identity. For instance, in a collection of short stories published in 1928, the woman writer Ding Ling created a fascinating array of portraits of the modern girl. Caught between the remaining powers of tradition and the emergent social norms of an unformed modernity, her heroines were in limbo, awkward, abject. Other contemporary sources, such as films and newspaper articles, equally attested to the predicaments that might have afflicted Chinese modern girls in a westernizing, hybridizing society. This state of abjection, one ought to remember, however, was largely the privilege of a minority— the bourgeoisie. What happened to lower-class women? Did they come into contact with the modern girl ideal and how did they respond to it? This presentation will look away from the somewhat familiar story of the abject middle-class modern girl toward narratives of lower-class women who strived for a modern identity but failed to fully achieve it. These failed subjects, Sang argues, are also abject modern girls. Their abjection is a direct consequence of modernity, in that advocates of westernization held out the promise of new social equality to those who had never dared to dream of equality under the imperial rule, but ultimately could not ensure upward mobility for the underclass in a peripheral capitalistic economy.

This plenary address is a part of the Eighth Annual Graduate Symposium on Women's and Gender History.

Museum visitors are reminded that food and drinks are not allowed in the Museum. Backpacks and other large items brought to the Museum will have to be stored; there is limited locker storage space available for these items.