The Gender of Memory: Rural Chinese Women and the 1950s

Hershatter, Gail

doi:10.1086/340906

Cited by 56 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…The men’s own expressed desire to share their stories of events and loves that had to be lived unspoken is part of what drives this article. The oral historian Gail Hershatter (2002: 44) writes about the time after liberation as one in which the ‘space of the Chinese nation was finally to be stabilised – its borders mapped and protected, its interior evenly governed by a Party/State’. She submits that, as oral life narratives are both an addition and an antidote to those understandings of history that have been limited to the documentation of officialdom and to geographic and political states, they constitute an important historical source.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘There was no mercy at all’: Hooliganism, homosexuality and the opening-up of China

Worth

Jing

McMillan

et al. 2018

International Sociology

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This article discusses the Chinese state crackdown on homosexuality during the reform period through the narratives of homosexual men who were arrested and sentenced to re-education through labour at that time. Utilising the work on morality and law by Zygmunt Bauman, it is shown that Deng Xiaoping’s proposal in 1979 to advance Chinese socialist spiritual civilisation was operationalised through a wide variety of procedures, including the use of the criminal justice system through the new crime of ‘hooliganism’. It was understood that the object infringed upon by hooliganism was the social order itself, through acts that violated the moral principles of Chinese society. Legislated in 1979, hooliganism was an obvious tool for the regulation of sexuality. Those engaged in hooliganism had to be severely punished. Seven men of the 31 men in our study were arrested and six were sentenced to re-education through labour.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘There was no mercy at all’: Hooliganism, homosexuality and the opening-up of China

Worth

Jing

McMillan

et al. 2018

International Sociology

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“…Smith 2006;Unger 1989). The reeducation of the lumpenproletariat has received far less attention in English, though shorter treatments can be found in Henriot (1995); Hershatter (1997). At once reeducators and reeducatees, superiors and subordinates, cadres mediated between the two groups by virtue of their membership in each.…”

Section: Resistance As Victimizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Scholars in Asia-related fields have been especially active in a series of broader academic debates over the discursive and experiential possibilities for resistance (Bianco 1999;Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden 2005;Guha 1988; Haynes and Prakash 1991;Hershatter 1993;O'Brien and Li 2006;Perry and Selden 2000;Scott 1987Scott , 1990Spivak, 1988;A. Yang 2007;K.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Thought Reform and the Unreformable: Reeducation Centers and the Rhetoric of Opposition in the Early People's Republic of China

Smith¹

2013

J of Asian Stud

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This essay explores records from Beijing's efforts to intern and reform the city's "lumpenproletariat" after 1949. Connecting these reports to central government directives about national thought reform policy, I show that reeducators and their superiors discoursed in detail about the existence of resisters, who opposed and defied the government, but whom reformatory staff explicitly labeled as non-enemies. The case of Beijing reformatories suggests that anti-state, but non-counterrevolutionary resistance was an important symbolic and rhetorical category, central to the Chinese Communist Party's articulation of its own purpose. In the context of reeducation, opposition to the party-state constituted evidence of a founding "truth": feudal, imperialist, and capitalist oppression had so damaged the Chinese nation that only a radical and revolutionary transformation could save it. Over the course of the 1950s, reading and analyzing resistance in this way led policy makers to redefine "The People" as well as the social place of individuals accused of activities like prostitution, begging, and petty crime.

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“…The importance of "telling bitterness" publicly lie in successfully linking the speaker's individual experience and emotions with those of the collective, forging an imagined collective identity and building an affective community that the revolutionary regime demanded (Hershatter, 2002;Rofel, 1999). The practice of holding "tea parties" still continues in contemporary China, when Party branches organize "tea parties" designed to involve people in the community during festival seasons.…”

Section: Affective Communication In Aversion Therapymentioning

confidence: 99%

On Not to be Gay: Aversion therapy and transformation of the self in Postsocialist China

Bao¹

2012

hcs

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In this article, through a critical reading of the published diaries written by gay 'patients' who received aversion therapy in south China in the 1990s, I examine how the transformation of subjectivities from gay to straight was made possible by such 'selftechnologizing' practices as writing and communication. I also consider the centrality of the body and affect in the process of subject (trans)formation, and ask how a new, coherent and authentic 'self' was fabricated through bodily and affective experiences. This discussion not only reveals the social construction of the self as central to China's postsocialist governmentality, but also the central role that gender and sexuality play in processes of self-formation.

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The Gender of Memory: Rural Chinese Women and the 1950s

Cited by 56 publications

References 5 publications

‘There was no mercy at all’: Hooliganism, homosexuality and the opening-up of China

‘There was no mercy at all’: Hooliganism, homosexuality and the opening-up of China

Thought Reform and the Unreformable: Reeducation Centers and the Rhetoric of Opposition in the Early People's Republic of China

On Not to be Gay: Aversion therapy and transformation of the self in Postsocialist China

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