The Many Dimensions of Chinese Feminism

In the current English-language publication market, this book is one of the earliest academic monographs to comparatively investigate different feminist scholars and academic feminism across the Taiwan Strait. It problematizes recent scholarly understanding of feminist complexity in various Chinese-speaking areas. This book addresses sociocultural backgrounds of how Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong feminist scholars strategize their transfers, localization, and acculturation of Western feminist literary theories. It emphasizes how Chinese literary theorists filter, gate-keep, select, import latest Western feminist theories, and then match them with local socio-cultural trends by exerting comparative researchers' cross-cultural and cross-lingual academic power in order to tackle Mainland China's, Taiwan's, and Hong Kong's own gender problems.

"Illuminating." - Hypatia

"A welcome addition to the fields of Chinese history, gender and cultural studies. Anyone interested in these areas should have a copy." - Journal of Asian Studies

"An important and distinct contribution to the understanding of feminism and, in particular, feminist scholarship in China." - The China Quarterly

"Seeking a theoretical 'round-trip' between Chinese and western feminism, Chen's fascinating new book is based on fifty interviews with feminist scholars, detailed historical and textual research, and investigation into local journals and newspapers. Arguing that over-simplification of a complex phenomenon - the many dimensions of Chinese feminism that she unravels and decodes - is another sign of Orientalism at work, Chen's work lends special insight." - Wendy Larson, Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Oregon

"This is a comprehensive inquiry into gender and its contested representations in a specific cultural context. Theoretically engaged and historically informed, it is a polemical reader for anyone interested in gender and cultural studies." - David Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University

"Chen shows the creativity and originality with which feminists in the Chinese cultural world have received Western, particularly French, feminist thought and explores the flow of ideas across ideological, linguistic, and political boundaries. Chen challenges Western scholars to acknowledge the complexity of the Chinese cultural area and to allow ideas from China to complicate Western feminism." - Sally Hastings, Associate Professor of History, Purdue University and Editor, U.S.-Japan Women's Journal

"This is an ambitious, well-researched and wide-ranging book that very carefully and effectively sets the history and evolution of Chinese feminisms against macro-narratives across the Taiwan Strait . . . Chen has given us a provocative and very brave book that scholars in a number of disciplines will enjoy reading and discussing with their graduate and undergraduate classes." - Murray Rubinstein, Professor of Asian History, Baruch College, CUNY and Visiting Professor, Columbia University, Taiwan Studies Chair of the Association for Asian Studies

YA-CHEN Chen's academic interests include Sino-Western comparative literature, Asian Studies, women's and gender studies, (multi)cultural studies, and film studies. Cited as an emergent diversity scholar by the National Center of Institutional Diversity (NCID) at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (2010), Ya-chen Chen is the recipient of Fu Cheng Literary Award (1995), CCA (Council for Cultural Affairs) Modern Literary Research Award (1997-8), Lynn Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship in Women's and Gender Studies (2001-2005), Faculty Fellowship Publication Program (FFPP) Grant (2009), William Stuart Research Award (2009), and Taiwan Studies Research Travel Grant (the first and so far the only Chinese-heritage winner, 2010). She published Farewell My Concubine: Same-Sex Readings and Cross-Cultural Dialogues (2004), Women in Taiwan: Sociocultural Perspectives (2009), and Higher Education in East Asia: Neoliberalism and the Professoriate (2009). Her academic articles appear in American Journal of Chinese Studies, Borrowers and Lenders: Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, Asian Cinema, Mediascape: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminism/o, Dangdai (Con-Temporary), and Shijie dianying (World Cinema), etc. Most of them are also included in Ohio State University's MCLC (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture) on-line resource center.