EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Gender Studies 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 194 go further. In Xiuwei deng, it is not a monk who preaches, but a mundane scholar, Fei Yingong, who imitates the Buddhist ritual of giving a sermon to enlighten the jealous wife Chunyun. In Cu hulu, the emulation of Buddhist norms shifts from modeling oneself on monks to imitating the tradition of sutra worship. The jealous wife Du receives a sutra, Papo zunjing (literally, “Revered Sutra of Fearing Wives”), during her trip to hell and attains enlightenment upon worshipping this “sutra.” Furthermore, the author’s pseudonym, Fuci jiaozhu (literally, Patriarch of the Jealous Women Taming School), sug- gests that he even intends to establish such a school through composing this novel. In conclusion, I argue that on the one hand, through adopting Buddhist plots, these narratives mold the roles of jealous wives as disciples of male masters, including monks, scholars, and the author himself. On the other hand, conventional Buddhist themes are parodied in these stories through the shifting identities of the male masters from an authentic monk to people who mimicking Buddhist ways of teaching. Woodman Sophia (University of Edinburgh) Changing Cultures of Women’s Human Rights in Transnational China: from the 1995 UNWomen’s Conference to Now Key words: feminism, human rights, cultural politics, China, United Nations This paper focuses on the cultural politics of human rights and women’s rights, now and 20 years ago when Beijing hosted the UN FourthWorld Conference onWomen. In the early 1990s, international feminist activists proclaimed that women’s rights were human rights, a perspective incorporated into official docu- ments produced by this and other UN conferences. Both then and now, in China and beyond, the association between these two terms has led to tensions and new opportunities for activism. Drawing on reflections on my own participation in the 1995 UN conference and observation of the evolution of activism around women’s rights in China since that time, but particularly in the last two years, this paper explores the cultural politics involved in the making of boundaries between the national and the transnational by looking at how terms such as “human rights”, “feminism” and “NGO” have been used and understood by different actors, and how this has changed over time. It draws on the idea of “cultural politics” as contested meaning-making to understand this discursive boundary-making and its effects, pointing to potential missed opportunities that might arise if feminism were seen as always already part of contemporary Chinese social and political life. Xie Chuning (Binghamton University (State University of New York)) Yitaitai —“The Other Woman”: Gender, Sexuality and Modernity in Republican China, 1911–1949 Key words: gender, concubines, yitaitai, modernity, sexuality The issue of “the other woman” is a phenomenon originating from Confucian teachings about proper gender roles. China has a long history of honorable courtesans and loyal concubines as a creative source for literati elites. Republican China (1911–1949) witnessed a dramatic change from the previously state- sanctioned practice of keeping concubines. Scientific language, Japanese neologism, Chinese nationalism, modernity all participated in shaping the role of gender and sexuality in Republican China. This project seeks to grapple with the social and cultural conceptualization of “the other woman” in modern Chinese history. First and foremost, it is crucial to trace the introduction, transformation and consolidation of the terms used to describe “the other woman” in which language and boundary drawing are essential. Yitaitai (concubine) and qingfu (mistress) are two most frequently invoked terms. Although used long before China’s republic, the meaning of yitaitai has been renegotiated and reasserted in the early twentieth century. Unlike the tradi- tional historiography in which May Fourth intellectuals and nationalists seemed to overpower and discard yitaitai in China’s evil past, I contend that the term gained new momentum. Compared to imported terms such as qingfu, yitaitai has connotations of family ties and thus reconfirmed the gender division. Qingfu, on the other hand, despite having the potential to empower women, has been used to refer to western-style extramarital relations and westernized Chinese women. This subversion is my central focus. In the second