WOMEN IN
CHINESE LITERATURE:
DAUGHTERS OF THE PATRIARCHY
Chinese 222, Fall 2008
Kauke 242, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:30--3:50
While it is simple and easy to tell how men and women differ anatomically, it takes some study to know how such biological or physiological differences came to be signified culturally from one historical period to another, or from one society to another. A survey of women's diverse experiences as represented and elaborated in Chinese myth, fable, legend, folk-lore, history, philosophy, religion, poetry, secular narrative fiction, music and film, the course will put under critical scrutiny the aesthetics and ethics used to idealize women, and introduce the concept of the whole woman as a key to understanding the formation of female gender identities. We'll also study how men and women write differently about such cultural institutions as motherhood, daughterhood or womanhood, especially as more and more women have begun writing about their own experiences. The theoretical focus is on constructions of the feminine in a patrilineal society.
The woman I need to call my mother was silenced before I was born.
----------- Adrienne Rich
Thanks to the confined space allowed for their activities, perfect women can appear more perfect than perfect men, while villainous women can be more thoroughly villainous than villainous men.
-----------Eileen Chang, On Women
The Bourgeois limitations in feminist theory are clearly demonstrated by its difficulty in dealing with prostitution, which is interpreted solely in outworn terms of victimization. That is, feminists profess solidarity with the "sex workers" themselves but denounce prostitution as a system of male exploitation and enslavement. I protest this trivilizing of the world's oldest profession. I respect and honor the prostitute, ruler of the sexual realm, which men must pay to enter. In reducing prostitutes to pitiable charity cases in need of their help, middle-class feminists are guilty of arrogance, conceit, and prudery. ...It is a progressive feminism that embraces and celebrates all historical depictions of women, including the most luridly pornographic. It wants mythology without sentimentality and every archetype, from mother to witch and whore, without censorship. It accepts and welcomes the testimony of men.
----------Camille Paglia, Vamps and Tramps
Feminists often compare marriage to slavery--with the female as slave. It seems like an insult to women's intelligence to suggest that marriage is female slavery when we know it is 25 million American females who read an average of twenty romance novels per month, often with the fantasy of marriage. Are feminists suggesting that 25 million American women have "enslavement" fantasies because they fantasize marriage?
---------Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are The Disposable Sex
This passion of the signifier then becomes a new dimension of the human condition, in that it is not only man who speaks, but in man and through man that it speaks. ... The phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark where the share of the logos is wedded to the advent of desire.
------------Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality
