MCLC: Mo Yan and Chinese feminism

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: d.hu <dbbie.h at gmail.com>
Subject: Mo Yan and Chinese feminism
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I found myself listening just now to an interview with Mo Yan on Ron
Silliman's blog 
(http://ronsilliman.blogspot.co.nz/2012/10/blog-post_13.html) and felt
annoyed when around 10:15 the interviewer asks Mo Yan, "Do you consider
yourself to be a feminist or are you simply drawn to write from a female
perspective?" There is no further gloss, and the translator ends up
translating it as, "Do you think that you are a feminist writer or do you
think that you are simply writing about women from a man's perspective?"

This question seems to indicate both a poor imagination of what "feminist
writing" could be as well as a poor understanding of how gender relations
and political history and therefore feminism might have different
conntations in China.

I have a Chinese friend in Shanghai who's a documentary filmmaker and a
woman, and a journalist from New York recently contacted her to ask the
question, "Are you a feminist artist?" She told me that she was really
taken aback because she had never asked herself that question before.
Since there was never a mass feminist movement in China, women and men
didn't have to "choose" between being "feminist" or "not feminist."

Even from a philosophical standpoint, feminist art (like dissident artist,
like "political art" in general) is not a straightforward category: is art
feminist that makes a feminist argument? what if it doesn't make any
arguments? is art feminist that represents women as strong? is art
feminist that intends to be feminist? is art feminist that contributes to
the feminist movement? what if there is no feminist movement? etc.