![]() Compared to Li’s romantic individualism, which recalls May Fourth idealism, Yang’s intellectual subjectivization demonstrates more fragmentation and disillusionment in his symbolic gesture of “divorcing” the nation. In “Handbook,” Yang Bo pays a large sum to get a divorce from his wife, who later refuses to grant the divorce and attempts suicide that fails but nonetheless humiliates Yang and puts him in a state of emotional desolation. ![]() Written in first-person narrative in the form of Li’s diary, the novel presents a male intellectual subject using his own divorce to challenge the 1980s power structure in an alleged search for liberal Chinese modernity. In Divorce, sociologist Li Bo’s strenuous, painful effort to divorce his wife turns futile, and he ends up committing suicide. She also pinpoints the symbolic and actual violence of the Cultural Revolution as a probable reason for the male-centered ideology of developmentalism.Ĭhapter 2 continues the investigation of male literary narratives of divorce by exploring Wu Ruozeng’s Divorce (1986) and Su Tong’s “A Divorce Handbook” (1991), both of which feature male intellectual protagonists associating their divorce experiences with the fate of the nation. Xiao eloquently demonstrates that in the early 1980s transition from Maoist socialism to Dengist developmentalism, male writers such as Chen and Ma proposed a new developmentalist alliance of science and romance at the expense of the rural woman as the abject Other of Chinese modernization. ![]() The sequel discloses that Shi eventually divorces his rural wife and moves to the city for good. Facing the difficult choice between his scientist lover and peasant wife, after graduation he eventually returns to his wife. The strength of her critique lies in her persistent questioning of the naturalization of gendered divisions in redefining sexuality, familial roles, and (inter)subjective positions in relation to the state and society.Ĭhapter 1 deals with Chen Kexiong’s and Ma Ming’s early-1980s story “Return, Cried the Cuckoo” and its sequel “Flying Afar.” Set in late 1970s China, “Return” tells the story of Shi Ping, a married peasant from a remote village who later attends college in Shanghai and falls in love with an urban girl studying nuclear physics. Xiao contributes to this enterprise through a feminist reading that lays bare the discursive contestation and structural inequality within one of the most significant affective labor projects in postsocialist China-that is, the dissemination of male-centered family ethics through literary and visual cultures. Generally referring to work conducted to produce or modify emotional experiences that have collective regulatory power, the notion of “affective labor” has increasingly been applied to contemporary Chinese cultural studies (see, e.g., Lu 2007). Xiao offers a powerful feminist critique of the familial operation of affective labor in postsocialist China. The family revolution is, as she rightfully notes, a “subjectivizing project” (182) that produces seminal positions of gender and class. As Xiao keenly reminds her readers throughout the book, the dramatically changing familial practices are largely attributable to the complex reciprocity between the governance of Chinese neoliberalism and the formation of a new domestic culture. Xiao is to be lauded for offering this thought-provoking volume, which analyzes “family” as a historically-situated and ideologically-mediated social institution with multifarious meanings vis-à-vis the postsocialist Chinese state-market-culture nexus. ![]() According to Xiao, while these divorce narratives demonstrate a collaboration with the male-centered state and society in cultivating women’s wifely and maternal qualities as the cure for China’s ongoing family disintegration and social disconcertment, they simultaneously embody the resurgence of gender inequality and the tightening of social control over the individual autonomy of private life. She argues that the representation of divorce in recent literature, film, and TV drama fashions a discursive arena for battling ideologies of family and marriage. With Family Revolution, Hui Faye Xiao makes a significant contribution to recent scholarship on the cultural representation of marital strife in contemporary China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. Hui Faye Xiao, Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture.
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