Post/feminist impulses: Neoliberal ideology and class politics in Annie Wang’s The people’s republic of desire (2006)
2017; Bridgewater State University; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1539-8706
Autores Tópico(s)Asian Culture and Media Studies
ResumoA Chinese women writer, Annie Wang hails from middle-class background and possesses flexible citizenship and global mobility (Ong, 1999:6). As Arif Dirlik underscores, rise of global capitalism is attended by rise of transnational capitalist class, which is responsible for management of global institutional, legal, and sectors (2006:167). This class includes social groups such as third world intellectuals and cultural producers in postcolonial context (Dirlik, 1997: 155). As professional, Wang had working experience in high-tech companies in Silicon Valley, The Washington Post's bureau in Beijing and US Department of State (Washington Post, 2016). Insofar as she names herself a bobo, bourgeois bohemian, Wang is of privileged class that benefits from globalization of capital (Vongs, 2006), and growing up among the higher echelons of China, she had friends from government elite (Crampton, 2001). With liberal father who was senior journalist, Wang regards herself and her two identified as the Chinese Bronte sisters, as intellectuals who relish high culture and non-commercial art (Kim, 2012). In interviews, Wang fashioned an image of her younger self as bourgeoisie bad girl, a misfit in China who was independent-thinking and opinionated (Random House, 2012). Deemed by her Beijing neighbours as wild, too direct, too rebellious, too uncouth, writer did not act the Chinese way nor possess the good traditional manners expected of Chinese girl (ibid). A bourgeois rebel in reticent Chinese society, Wang outcast naturally [felt] closer to Western culture: In early 1980s when most Chinese had never heard of Swan songs, or Nutcracker, my father took me and my sisters to see ballet, modern dance by foreign troupes, opera. I was totally fascinated with bourgeois. I became more familiar with Beatles songs than revolutionary songs. Our idols were James Bond and John Lennon instead of Chinese revolutionary martyrs Dong Cuirui or Lei Feng. I traded newly available translations of On Road, The Birth of Tragedy, [The] Catcher in Rye, and The Diary of Anne Frank, and Michael Jackson and Madonna tapes with my friends. My dream was to get college degree from famous American school (ibid) Wang's childhood fascination with bourgeois and West lured her into University of California, Berkeley, (2) thus fulfilling her American dream (Washington Post, 2016). This authorial narrative about Chinese middle-class and its access to global and Western culture reverberates with those of heroines in The People 's Republic of Desire. Identifying herself as women's rights activist alongside other descriptors, Wang is not equivocal about her political sympathy for women (Chinese Culture Net, 2016). This avowed interest in feminism echoes that of her father who, according to Wang, was on vanguard of feminist movement in early Chinese reform era (ibid). Remarkably, Wang's authorial positioning calls forth controversial group of post-seventies Chinese female such as Wei Hui and Mian Mian who go by various appellations: beauty writers, glam lit writers and bad-girl writers (Yang, 2011: 2; Chan, 2010: 53). On one hand, their portrayal of exuberant female sexuality in consumerist urban spaces seemed to initiate unique brand of post-Mao Chinese feminism through sexual revolution that set Chinese and global literary markets astir in 1990s. On other hand, their espousal of sexual agency and individual choice in class-based neoliberal rhetoric chimes with postfeminist ideology in Euro-America. As Sheldon H. Lu holds, phenomenon of beauty writers constitutes not only politics of liberation and excess in post-socialist China, but also logic of cultural commercialization in global capitalist milieu (2007:54). …
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