Between WoMen: Homosocial Inscription and Trans-relational Aesthetics in and beyond the Chinese World

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the promises and threats of women’s transnational coalitions. It asks, in what ways would female homosocial inscription, that is, women’s collective performance of inscribing lived experience onto material surface, increase women’s accessibility to materials and empower women from marginalized positions, while the global neoliberal economy subjects individuals into precarious social fields? How would the relations of materials, the individual and the collective in female homosocial inscription help understand the power relations in transnational feminist coalitions?I examine these questions through the lens of artistic practice themed on women’s writings. Specifically, women’s writings refer to gendered performance in two settings: the culture of nüshu (literally, women’s writings) based on gendered script in rural China and women’s nüshu-themed contemporary artworks in Beijing, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Conventionally, the culture of nüshu always keeps the boundaries between individual and collective articulations in motion through its demands that each woman establish specific relations with nüshu-making in collective events. Being appropriated as a cultural product in contemporary China, nüshu’s conventional functions are now on the verge of disappearance. The neoliberal state recruits nüshu’s functional disappearance as evidence of its achievement in gender equality, and the neoliberal market rationality deprives nüshu of women’s aesthetic investments and develops nüshu cultural products based on Chinese-language centered aesthetics. In response to this context, this dissertation maps a new cartography of three types of nüshu—the historical nüshu, the neoliberalizing nüshu and the artistic nüshu, and examines art’s capacity to subvert the neoliberal hegemony on women’s writings. Drawing from my own fieldwork from 2016-2019 and writing with an interdisciplinary approach including (auto-)ethnography, interviews, and theories of art criticism and formal analysis, this dissertation analyzes four cases in artistic nüshu—laments writing, calligraphy performance, choreography and cinematography. I examine the ways they retrieve the feminist capacity of historical nüshu, recruit nüshu-related bodies, articulate local experience and produce sensual knowledge responding to regional politics, everyday life, and aesthetics. I argue, in performing homosocial inscriptions alluding to those in the historical nüshu, artistic nüshu sheds lights on the mutual articulations of the individual and the collective in women’s transnational coalitions in the contemporary context. On the global landscape of transnational feminisms and in the surge of nationalism in places such as China, transnational feminist coalitions may accidentally contribute to the power of heteropatriarchal nationalism, as my epilogue shows. However, the selected artistic nüshu projects in the four chapters turn gendered coalitions of women’s writings into multi-focal, decentered fields for recruited writing bodies to subvert their specific relations to the Chinese-centered social injustice. These are relations of the corporeal experience about transmission against Chinese-centered aesthetics and representation, of the unspeakable post-colonial experience and its lack of expression in Chinese, and many more. In these feminist coalitions, an open part-whole relation is created, showing that the individual recruitment in one coalition does not commit to a whole identification with the group. Rather, individuals may be empowered through the collective performance and emerge with new subjectivity beyond the collective. This is art’s trans-relational aesthetics, inviting us to revisit the threats in historical responsibility and offering sensual response-ability as a new media of feminist ethics.