Running Head: THE MANY FACES OF WOMEN IN SELECTED WORKS International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture and Education (original) (raw)
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The Many Faces of Women in Selected Works by Asian Female Writers
2015
The purpose of this study is to look at the portrayal of women in some works by selected Asian female writers, in Particular from Hong Kong and Japan. Selected works by Xu Xi and Agnes Lam from Hong Kong and Hitomi Kanehara and Banana Yoshimoto from Japan are referred to. The study examines the representation of women in search of their identities, accomplishments, confusions and cultural dislocation within the paradigm of feminism theoretical framework. The study focuses on identifying how women are put into images by female writers, as the voice between different genders will appear to be diametrically opposed. The study yields insights on the discordance of behavior between the traditional and modern women in Asia setting.
Female consciousness in contemporary Chinese women's writing
2010
Contemporary Chinese women writers re-emerged after the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). This thesis investigates a selection of stories by Chinese women writers published between 1979 and the end of 1990s. The investigation argues for an oppositional female consciousness and endeavours to demonstrate its various expressions in women writers' texts, covering such themes as love, family, career, intellectuals, working class, the female self, and social manners. Apart from the thematic concerns of female consciousness, the thesis also explores its expressions in unconventional narrative styles of representative women writers' texts. In conclusion, the thesis points out that female consciousness provided women writers, who live as women, a vantage-point from which they may view the self as well as others and society. In so doing, they write differently (from their male peers) and subversively.
"This paper examines gender marking in two contemporary novels: the Japanese translation of Bridget Jones’s Diary (BDJ , translated by Yoshiko Kamei in 1998) and the Japanese novel Kitchen (by Banana Yoshimoto, 1988). As a benchmark to see the gap between literary language, supposedly authentic women’s language, and real women’s language, a linguistic analysis of Japanese women’s conversation (Okamoto and Sato 1992) is used. I begin by placing these two novels within a broader context where gender marking in many forms of written communication serves a distinctly ideological agenda. A literary movement known as genbun-itchi in the Meiji period was a key to the implantation of women’s language in literature. During the period, gendered language was promoted by the literary movement, which played a crucial role in spreading the belief that women and men should speak differently (Ueno 2003: 24). Thus the linguistic norms of gendered language use in literature were established. That is, literature functioned as a mediator of the norms. A Japanese translation of the Russian writer Turgenev triggered the movement, and the convention of gendering language in literature started from translation. Modern Japanese prose benefited considerably from translation due to the conventions in the Japanese literary world. After more than a century since the genbun-itchi movement, women’s speech in literature is still artificially represented (ibid), and the over-feminising tendency in Japanese translation and literature shapes gender ideology in Japanese society."
2010
How do we negotiate space for the female body in the age of economic and cultural globalisation? Feminism celebrates it. Nationalism disciplines it. Global consumerism profits from it. The cover of the book is an eye-full-sexy, sensual, poudré and glossy. The popular culture concept and the motifs are apt. Item: delicate nostril; mouth, lips shining with femme fatale lipstick; skin, flesh peach-toned; Chinese flag, red and yellow, central and uppermost on a ball that substitutes for the 'o' in 'Global'; titles, pictogram-style. Hyper-real! Exaggerated! The female body is a contested site for the power struggle between feminists, nationalists, capitalists and neo-colonialists. Dr Zhu suggests that Third World women or women of colour feel trapped by the incumbent discourses and the dilemma is complicated by an 'often voyeuristic, even pornographic, global popular culture' (1). Post-colonial theories turn against Western values and a Euroamericentric male-dominated world. This review ventures little in the way of my personal opinion except to say that Aijun Zhu's project not only justifies itself but makes fascinating reading for any person voyaging out towards the Asian diaspora from an English base, and for any reader interested in the transnational crossing of cultures from a feminist perspective. Feminism and Global Chineseness: The Cultural Production of Controversial Women Authors is, as Professor Jianmei Liu of Maryland University acclaims, 'ambitious, original and provocative' and a work of 'solid scholarship' (xiii). Dr Zhu examines four controversial authors from four different geopolitical Chinese locations. She argues that each location is a distinct local construct and that she chooses her sites in order to problematise and decentre notions of Chineseness. She declares that Chineseness is not only about ethnicity but about the instability of migration and border-crossing. Zhu's project explores cultural exchange and places the accent on flexibility, fluidity and hybridity of cultural and literary production as well as critical negation. What makes women's bodies controversial? Professor Liu suggests that it is not only because they deal with audacious topics-sex, desire, politics, all taboo subjects for traditional Chinese women-but because the politics of literary and cultural criticism imagine and construct tensions between gender, race and ethnicity. Zhu herself contends that notions of controversy are produced in essential and reductive frameworks of feminism, nationalism and consumerism and identifies the cause of controversy in literary production as 'representational inevitability', a mindset which holds that any Third World text inevitably represents the totality of Third World national or racial realities and that Third World authors speak for their national or racial communities. She argues that 'representational inevitability' is the masculinist and nationalistic discourse under which women are made controversial and feminism is appropriated. She says that her task is to unproduce the controversy and open out the terms to more flexible meaning production and the recognition of 'issues'. Zhu is a Chinese-born, naturalised Chinese American feminist critic and writes in her introduction that the outsider/insider status gives a unique perspective
International Journal of Humanity Studies (IJHS)
This paper explores the discourse on womanhood in the Asian context by delving into the narratives of women characters in five short stories by three Asian writers. Specifically, it attempted to determine the images associated with Asian women based on the portrayal of the main protagonists in the selected short stories. It then analysed how these images construct womanhood and perpetuate such ideal in the Asian mindset. Viewed from both formalist and constructionist lenses, findings show that the women protagonists are relegated to their three-pronged traditional roles/images: daughter, wife, and mother. These images, in turn, shape how these characters behave and are seen by other characters - submissive, self-sacrificing and subjugated. However, despite an unrelentingly difficult life, all the five women still struggle to survive. Such act seems inconsistent with the above stereotypical construct of womanhood, though a closer look actually shows a different side to the said const...