Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after SocialismIn this analysis of three generations of women in a Chinese silk factory, Lisa Rofel brilliantly interweaves the intimate details of her observations with a broad-ranging critique of the meaning of modernity in a postmodern age. The author based her study at a silk factory in the city of Hangzhou in eastern China. She compares the lives of three generations of women workers: those who entered the factory right around the Communist revolution in 1949, those who were youths during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s, and those who have come of age in the Deng era. Exploring attitudes toward work, marriage, society, and culture, she convincingly connects the changing meanings of the modern in official discourse to the stories women tell about themselves and what they make of their lives. One of the first studies to take up theoretically sophisticated issues about gender, modernity, and power based on a solid ethnographic ground, this much-needed cross-generational study will be a model for future anthropological work around the world. |
Contents
| 41 | |
The Poetics of Productivity | 96 |
Socialist Nostalgia | 128 |
UNSETTLING MEMORIES | 150 |
Interlude | 153 |
She | 159 |
The Politics of Authority | 166 |
Yearnings | 188 |
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activities allegory anthropology argued become birth birth-planning capitalism capitalist challenge Chen Shifu China Chinese women class labels colonial Confucian consciousness countryside created critique Cultural Revolution cohort dernity desires discourse dominant economic reform femininity feminism feminist foreign gender identities global Hangzhou Hongyun husband imaginary of modernity imagined intellectuals interpretations Joan Scott Judith Butler kinship labor lives Lou Shengzhi male managers Maoist marriage marry Marxism masculinity meaning memories narrative nature nostalgia older workers oldest cohort party cadres past peasant politics of authority position post-Mao postsocialist prep production regime relations representations semicolonialism sexual shift leader silk factories silk industry silk weaving social socialist realist space spatial speaking bitterness specific story subaltern subjects Tang Shan thread tion told transnational tural turn University Press wages weavers weft western woman women's liberation workshop writing Xiao Bao yearning young Yu Shifu Zhejiang Zhenfu Zhuren
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Page 38 - But how refer to an irreversible past, that is, a past which this very reference would not bring back, like memory which retrieves the past, like signs which recapture the signified? What would be needed would be an indication that would reveal the withdrawal of the indicated, instead of a reference that rejoins it.
Page 16 - By playing three times in a row on the alternation between transcendence and immanence, the moderns can mobilize Nature, objectify the social, and feel the spiritual presence of God, even while firmly maintaining that Nature escapes us, that Society is our own work, and that God no longer intervenes.