Female writing has become a cultural symbol of social civilization
We have begun to separate gender from literature, defined the concept of "female literature", and begun to see the gender of literature The differences have an impact on literature and life. The concept of "difference" comes from the comparison between the recognized object and the memory. This comparison is actually a reflection on the old literary common sense. It can be said that the modernization of contemporary Chinese literature, in a sense, is constantly moving forward in the promotion and recognition of this difference.
In the century-old Chinese literature, a large number of female writers have emerged and a large number of women's issues have received unprecedented literary attention. A large number of multiple narratives and descriptions of rural, urban and sexual relations between the sexes, women's transformation from physical philosophy to Soul whipping, from "bringing red" to "scrutinizing men" and even the original desires of Ah Q and Wu Ma, all show the poetic expression of literature in this difference, showing the deep differences in the literary relationship between the sexes. It has become the essence of literary modernization.
However, starting from the root of the word female, the literary definition of it is actually very problematic. It seems to respect and separate literature related to female gender from creation to practice, and to distinguish it from men. Seek differences and balance to show fairness. Seeing differences is a kind of progress, but the difference itself is a kind of discrimination. Therefore, the definition of female literature is full of problems - this is a long-standing mistake in the academic circles - does it refer to the gender of the author and not the rest? Does it refer to literary themes and female consciousness? Or both? This phenomenon is not uncommon in the history of literature: first, the images of women written by female writers are no different from those written by male writers; second, male writers can still write works with female meanings or feminism, such as Yu Dafu, Ye Lingfeng, etc.; there are also female writers. Revolutionary writers such as Cao Ming and Liu Zhen wrote masculine, rough and devoid of female consciousness.
(Therefore, a more accurate definition of "female literature" should be "female writing". This is the literary respect given to women by social openness and literary progress, and it is also the way that modern social civilization uses literary expression to peek into gender differences and Toward a harmonious rational supplement. It is probably not the purpose of feminism to confine women's issues within the gender perspective of female writers.)
The question is not about who writes. In the patriarchal era, women write. It is regarded as proof of resistance to male supremacy, but what about in the era of feminism? The gender of the author has no particular significance. In a modern society that advocates equality between men and women but where gender civilization is still growing and declining, women's writing demonstrates its unique significance. In other words, women's writing itself has transcended itself and become a flag, a flag for independence and equality, a cultural symbol indicating the degree of social gender civilization.
The feminist movement promoted the development of women's literature
The French Revolution awakened women's consciousness and raised the issue of women's status in society. At the end of the 19th century, a movement for women's political suffrage took place in the United States and the United Kingdom. The first goal was to fight for the right to vote, and then to fight for equality in education, culture, and work. By the 1960s, the feminist movement was still booming.
On December 30, 1987, Spain's "Ultimate Daily" published an article "World Feminist Movement": "The education world is no longer the sphere of influence of men, and the ratio of male and female students entering university has gradually become... To balance, women have realized that education is the only way to seek a career. Women who advocated sexual liberation 20 years ago now find that they have become a tool for men to satisfy their desires. Therefore, they have even organized against beauty pageants, which they consider to be an insult to women. . On a series of issues, clear judgments need to be made. Women all over the world know that they still have a long way to go, but the goal will not change. This is equality between men and women. ”
The basic trajectory of this description at least shows the following tendency. After years of setbacks and repetitions, the feminist movement has shifted from its initial focus on improving conditions other than itself to women themselves, including their experience of social life and family roles, and to their inner life needs. This turn inspires us to conduct a historical review and cleanup of the past feminist movements. The feminist movement is actually about fighting for the right to balance and equalize the psychological needs of men in social life.
To a large extent, this struggle is a questioning and resistance to men being regarded as the "species model". Men are seen as normative in all myths, while women are variations and deviations from this norm. Men are the subject and women are the other body. The motive of all men's actions towards women is to "take back", while as a rib, all the passivity of women is to "return". This is the oldest footnote of patriarchal theory and the philosophical explanation of the relationship between men and women. According to this understanding, if women are compared to left-handers, women live in a world created for right-handers, in which men represent the norm. Examples of the psychological effects produced by this concept can be found in many cultural behaviors of human society.
In English, the word "man" can be used as a general term for human beings, while in Japanese, the semantic meaning of "man" is "master". There is no word "she" in ancient Chinese. Women's existence is replaced by men in the language field around the world. This linguistic phenomenon is particularly profound proof of the overall invasion of human culture by male culture, while women use a The collective unconscious accepts this invasion and penetration. This kind of deep consciousness is also in a conscious and ultra-stable state in men. History has thus arranged the advantages of men in all aspects. However, anyone with a little knowledge of ancient history and culture knows that the so-called male model is actually the result of a long history of patriarchal society and does not have sufficient biological basis. The myth of the male model is also in a state of flux in different cultural periods.
This kind of historical change shows its charming flavor in literature with a parabolic trajectory.
Human beings originated in the female abdomen. The ancient people’s sacred worship of women has woven the matriarchal center for a long time. China's earliest mythology, "The Classic of Mountains and Seas", fiercely records the majesty of China's first goddess, the Queen Mother of the West. This is the great image of the head of the gods in the early people's cosmology. The Queen Mother of the West was the goddess of the maternal society in the primitive era. She went from being half human and half beast in the original mythology to becoming the leader of the immortals in the Wei and Jin Dynasties. At this point, she completed her final evolution and has no further development since then. This at least shows that the distant memories of the matriarchal years have infiltrated the long historical era. After being replaced by patriarchy, literature still has fresh memories of it. However, in the face of the increasingly powerful male power, it gradually becomes dim and penetrates into contemporary people. thoughts.
The changes in social history and political economy have completely erased people’s last memories of the matriarchal years. The decline of women’s political and economic status is completely reflected in the evolution of myths. The long matriarchal years disappeared into the chaos of prehistory. Since the beginning of civilization, male dominance has been controlling the development of history. Women have turned from sacred to evil. As the opposite of this development, they have been rewritten in mythology. , is reversed in reality. In Greek mythology, "Pandora's Box", Eve becomes the source of all evil. These myths or doctrines based on male dominance are nothing more than emphasizing the male order in reality. The male-centered myth has disappeared in modern civilized society, but as a non-conscious ideology, it always dominates the psychology and behavior of men and even women, becoming an invisible criterion for knowing and doing. To what extent are women aware of the dangers of this unconscious thought in daily life and spirituality? To what extent are its subtle living conditions and formal representations subject to profound rational criticism?
Women’s self-awakening and self-imagination are publicized in literature
Women’s self-awakening is first publicized in literature. The repression of women is first of all the repression of human nature, that is, the repression of sex and passion. The May 4th New Literature created a context for the liberation of individuality. In particular, the famous and accomplished writers of the "Creation Society" used the relationship between the sexes as a starting point to focus on expressing human desires and nature, releasing the self, liberating emotions, The human revolution of lust is a topic that the Creation Society is passionate about. According to the "Introduction" written by Mao Dun in 1935 for "Chinese New Literature Series·Novel Collection", between May and July 1921, there were 115 new novels published in various magazines, among which love There are 70 novels, only 8 about rural life, 3 about urban life, 9 about family life, 5 about school life, and 20 about social life. Family life and social life "actually describe the relationship between men and women."
Therefore, "it can be said that novels describing the love between men and women account for 98% of all novels." This tendency has been repeated again in the creation of novels since the new era, and this time the performance is actually a combination of yin and yang.
Women’s writing first gained momentum in the 1980s, burst into flames in the 1990s, and has become a flood in the 21st century. It is female writers, not male writers, who are the most outstanding and the furthest in the literary description of gender issues. Provocation has become the means and purpose of so-called literature. Regardless of these things that are out of place and far away from literature, the literary tradition that continues the May Fourth New Literature of individual liberation and self-expression, and has revolutionary subversion, is written by women. to complete.
In contemporary literature, Zhang Jie's "Love Can't Be Forgotten" is the first to touch upon the tragedy of women loving but not being able to love, but not being able to forget what they love, questioning the injustice in the relationship between the sexes. The rationality of the love factor, explores the current practice of interpreting "Only marriage based on love is moral" in Engels's "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" in a literary way. This was undoubtedly ground-breaking in 1979, just after the Cultural Revolution, and it was also a work that struck the lifeline of Chinese-style marriage. The heroine Zhong Yu cannot realize her love in reality, so she can only invest her love for him in his gift - a collection of Chekhov's novels, and place her bitter love in this world in heaven and the afterlife. Zhang Jie skillfully expresses the long-buried desire for life of Chinese women, and puts this desire under the freedom of escape. Responsibility, morality, restraint and other human virtues seemed to instantly turn into a giant wall from the ancient wasteland, lying between two souls that were painfully attracted and tired of separation, alienated into a kind of disguised sublimity. She turned the anxiety of female life into a kind of sublimity. She rebelled against her personal desires and obeyed a certain morality. Zhang Jie puts the protagonist's tragedy into a cruel dialogue system to interpret it, thereby alienating herself. Zhang Jie weaves this story decisively, soberly and rationally, and uses first-person narration to make the characters obsessed and addicted, unable to extricate themselves but still hopeless. The alienated state of the work objectifies the complex situation of female psychological self-control and argumentation, completing the A reflection of a universal truth. Therefore, Zhang Jie realized that she was not just standing in a narrow female position, but looking down on the various challenges in the Eastern cultural atmosphere in the relationship between the sexes from the commanding heights of human beings.
Female writing is a symbol of urban fashion and consumption
The following is another kind of female writing, Ying Chuan’s novels. While pursuing pure love, she shaped It is about men, and this shaping is achieved in the face of differences and repeated separation and separation. This also represents the humanistic achievements of the evolution of feminism in Chinese society in the 21st century. They have gone far out of the prison of Zhang Jie's era. They are no longer passively chosen, but actively and aggressively chosen. Choice is freedom.
In the novel "Women's Jianghu", Yingchuan created a woman who not only knows what she loves and how to love, but also has the impact of subjectivity "I want". In the constant escape and return of emotions and humanity, she realizes the mutual rescue of herself and the other person, and lays out the differences between them. She wanders in an extremely free love space, but instinctively avoids the intrusion of freedom. After experiencing three different men, she finally chose Gu Jiao among them. She wrote her last letter to Gu Jiao. She was helpless and eager at the same time. This was a pure surrender to mediocrity, and it was also a challenge and reconciliation to men. This is a defensive attack and a wise move. It is not only the ultimate realistic posture of women, but also the rational posture that life itself prepares for women.
Yingchuan is naturally not as cold as Duras, nor as heart-rending and melancholy as Zhang Jie. She just chooses to consume love wisely and fashionably. And her plot of love penetrates the mediocrity of life, with an oriental modern cunning.
In this article, literary women have multiple flavors. From the Queen Mother of the West to Rongdeng, the period spans the blurry figure of women from gods to humans, from human liberation and publicity to human spiritual freedom. It can be read from it that the progress of women in the era is also facing a more spiritual crisis. Women's writing has a different value in this crisis.
Especially in the process of modern urbanization, women and women's writing are a symbol of urban fashion and consumption. Urbanization is actually also feminization. Shenzhen, for example, is a city for women in terms of consumption, fashion and quality of life.
Women's literature, which started with the "May 4th" New Culture Movement, is an important and indispensable aspect of Chinese literature in the 20th century. She was born at the same time as the "May Fourth" new literature and has experienced nearly a hundred years of historical vicissitudes. The fifth and sixth generations of female writers have emerged with rich creative achievements.
If modernity is the characteristic that distinguishes new literature from traditional literature, then we have avoided the question of whether women's literature is the new literature of modernity for too long. Answering this question is actually the starting point for the study of female literature in my country. The question of what women’s literature is, which we still talk about since the name women’s literature appeared, must also start from defining and sorting out the modernity of women’s literature.
19th-20th Century: The Brilliant Sunrise of Women's Literature
Elizabeth Janeway pointed out in "Contemporary American Literature·Women's Literature": Because women's literature comes from the erased human beings " The other half’s life experiences require “a lens of a different power to see them clearly.” 〔1〕 In other words, if the "degree" of this "lens" is to match the reality of women's literature, it must start with the birth of women's literature.
Whether it is Eastern or Western languages, words such as humanbeing, human, and history do not include women. They are absent in the category of human beings and history. who. The rational humanistic ideas of the Renaissance and Enlightenment are abstract people, and if they are more concrete, they only refer to men. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Women of the French Revolution was only a declaration of the rights of men. Arremp de Jugault, who discovered this, published the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Female Citizens in 1791, two years after the French Revolution. She was later sent to prison for this. On the guillotine. The Napoleonic Code clearly stipulates: "Minors, married women, prisoners and mentally ill people have no right to exercise the law." It was only during the movement to emancipate black slaves that American women realized that they were in the same powerless position as black people, so they actively participated in The slave liberation movement triggered the feminist movement from the 1920s to the 1940s. In 1848, the "Declaration of Women's Independence" similar to the French Declaration of Women's Rights was issued. In this declaration, they changed the word "human" to "＠①". 〔2〕 It can be seen that women’s awakening begins with the realization of the factual inequality between people concealed by the abstract concept of “people”, and begins with women’s pursuit and exploration of the full realization of their own value as human beings. By the 1960s, which was the second wave of the American feminist movement, Betty Friedan, known as the mother of the modern American feminist movement, recorded and reflected on this in detail in her "The Myth of Women" and "The Second Phase" . The "Feminine Mystique" was her name in 1963 for an erroneous trend of thought about women at the time, which defined women only in terms of "sex" and biological motherhood. 〔3〕She calls the two feminist movements in the United States in which women went out to fight for the same working rights as men as a "passionate journey" with the purpose of "seeking new identity" and a "strong rejection of the definition of women." and recognition. They strive to prove: 'Women are people too.'" All this shows that the ideological impetus of the Western feminist movement is also from the discovery and awakening of human beings to the discovery and awakening of women. It shows that women’s discovery and awakening are the deepening and concretization of humanistic value ideals. This is what I name here as the female humanist thought.
Women’s literature worldwide can only appear during the transition from agricultural society to modern industrial and commercial society after the modern industrial revolution, democratic revolution and religious reform, and during the process of modernity when modern humanistic ideas are deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. middle. The specific time for this varies from country to country, but generally it was only in the 19th and 20th centuries that it became a global literary trend. Especially in the second half of this century, driven by the feminist movement of Western women fighting for human rights, women's literature spread all over the world. Developed and underdeveloped regions of the world.
Although the 17th and 18th centuries in France were called “the age of women,” there were very few female writers before the 20th century. Even in Italy and Greece, the cradle of the Renaissance, the emergence of a large number of female writers only occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 〔4〕In this regard, the 19th and 20th centuries can also be said to be the century of women’s literature and the brilliant sunrise of women’s literature around the world.
The birth of women’s literature in China is similar to that of other countries in the world, but there are differences. In the preface to the book "Nala's Words - The Mental Journey of Modern Chinese Women Writers" (Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 1993 edition), I made a detailed analysis of the spread of Western learning to the east, the establishment of women's schools, the ban on women in universities, and the recruitment of women at the beginning of this century. Major reforms in the educational system such as female overseas students, as well as the spiritual achievements of the May Fourth ideological enlightenment (the discovery of man, the discovery of awakening women, the inner connection between awakening and the birth of female literature), analyze A group of modern intellectual women who have received both good education in traditional culture and modern higher education. Without such modern intellectual women, there would be no female literature in our country. The preliminary conclusion I came to is that female literature "shares the same fate with human nature and personality" and "shares the same fate with historical progress in the true sense." What can be added now is that women and female literature have the same destiny as the perfection of human nature, the liberation of individuality, democracy, freedom, equality, civilization, progress, peace and development, which are the values ??that all human beings cherish, and the female humanities The full realization of socialist values ??and the same destiny.
The difference is that in Western countries, there is generally a gap of 200-300 years between the discovery of man and the discovery of women, while in our country, some ideological pioneers began to develop the concept of human liberation before and after the "May 4th" New Culture Movement. It is also put forward in the proposition:
Before women, who account for half of the human race, have not correctly understood their personality, cannot obtain full freedom, and cannot participate in cultural undertakings, no matter how human beings evolve, they will always They are dry humans. 〔5〕 (emphasis added by the citation)
The liberation of our country’s people and the liberation of women were proposed simultaneously on the same time plane. Although it shortened the long waiting period for Western women, it also made The road for women after awakening is particularly winding and long, so they often have to endure the sadness of having no way to go after waking up. The overwhelming sense of confusion, hesitation, and desolation in the works of early female writers Lu Yin, Shi Pingmei, and Feng Yuanjun originated from the contradiction between the ideal of female liberation and the dull and backward reality of the ancient feudal country. As an anti-feudal ideological fighter, Lu Xun was also a staunch advocate of women's liberation. However, he soon became aware of the ambiguity in the future of women's liberation. He raised the question "What will happen to Nora after she leaves?" and had to let his brave son You died alone and sadly.
Chinese women’s literature began with the “May 4th” New Culture Movement. It was precisely because of women’s collective awakening of their own value ideals as human beings that they appeared in the first group of modern female writers-the “Fifth Movement”. In the works of "Four" female writers, although this kind of awakening inevitably contains the hazy confusion and immaturity of those who have just awakened. Some commentators regard the May Fourth New Culture Movement as Eurocentric, and therefore the May Fourth women’s value recognition of Nora, the heroine of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, is also included in this list. This is an external theory of historical development that ignores the social reality of the country and the nation. As Mr. Yan Jiayan pointed out, "Regarding scientific rationality, industrialization, and modernization as the patents monopolized by European countries is the true Eurocentrism." [6] The rise of women's literature around the world in the 19th and 20th centuries fully illustrates It demonstrates the appeal of the modern humanistic trend of thought that “believes that people and human values ??are of primary importance” [7] to oppressed people around the world. This is a spiritual wealth that transcends nation, region and time and belongs to all mankind. It is more attractive, affinity and identity for Chinese women who suffer from the double oppression of class and gender. Nora's "First of all, I am a human being, just like you" was spoken by a white European woman, but it also expresses the aspirations of Chinese women for liberation, because human independence and freedom have not yet been achieved. On this fundamental point, the situation and aspirations of women all over the world are the same.
The above description and analysis of the birth of female literature in my country can determine the historical and modern connotation of the concept of female literature.
In other words, it is a new literature about women with modern humanistic value connotations produced under certain historical conditions. Elizabeth Janeway said that the "lenses of different degrees" needed to read and analyze women's literature are specifically modern women as human beings and people as women. The former defines "women are human beings", while the latter defines "women are human beings with the natural gender they are born with". This also unifies "men and women are the same" that ignores natural gender and "men and women are different" that emphasizes gender differences under the value goal of female humanism, which is the "being human and being a woman" proposed by the "May Fourth" thinkers "Double Consciousness".
The two concepts of gender and sex established by Western feminist scholars with great efforts are based on the basic theory of Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" Developed from "A woman is not born, she is made a woman", it has a revolutionary insight into deconstructing the gender domination of patriarchy and sexism, allowing women to realize their "other" and "sub-sexual" position. , but when women are aware of all this, they also demand change and transcendence, and change themselves and transcend themselves towards the goal of becoming a complete and sound woman. This perseverance and exploration that becomes more and more frustrated is what our country's women in the 20th century The ideological power of literature. The two concepts of "social gender" and "natural gender" as well as the "female consciousness", "gender consciousness" and "gender standpoint" commonly used in the study of women's literature in my country are not enough to fully grasp the nature of women's literature. Therefore, the two prepositional phrases "as a person" and "as a woman" are indispensable. Only in this way can women's natural gender and social gender, and the world of facts and the world of values ??be unified under the goal of modern humanistic ideals. stand up.
Women’s Literature: Women·Women·Feminism
For more than half a century, people have always been accustomed to literally understand women’s literature as a kind of gender literature classified by gender. , just like youth literature is classified by age and Western literature is classified by region, women's literature is just a gender dialect that specifically marks the gender of the writer. If this is the case, women's literature will not only lose its basic theoretical significance, but may also play a role in strengthening women's "second sex" status, making those born as women feel some kind of invisible and indescribable tolerance. Emergence of sexism. This is the psychological reason why some female writers refuse to identify with the term women’s literature. Moreover, the stronger their self-confidence and sense of independence are, the more female writers who have profound experience of gender inequality refuse to classify themselves under the name of female literature.
The paradox that women’s literature is both gender literature and not gender literature can be explained by the semiotic theory of modern linguistics. The conceptual symbol and the object it refers to are not identical. Language both illuminates and obscures the object it refers to. Its meaning is something temporary and yet to be discovered. No symbol can perfectly exhaust the full meaning of the object it refers to. Therefore, the meaning of concepts (especially concepts in the humanities) often contains paradoxes waiting to be discovered, filled in, and updated. 〔8〕The aforementioned American Women's Declaration of Independence changed the word "human" to "＠①", and the Chinese female students changed the word "he" in the handouts to "＠②". American women created another world besides history. Herstory is the semiotic embodiment of women's demand for equality between men and women in the human category.
Saussure believed that meaning in language is simply a matter of difference, and that each sign means something only because it does not mean what other signs mean. If we want to define the meaning of a symbol relatively stably and accurately, we should exclude similar or specious meanings, that is, we must start with what the symbol is not.
What is women’s literature not?
The aforementioned paradox about gender literature means that although women’s literature is marked by the gender concept of “female”, it is not necessarily women’s literature written by female writers.
Although the natural gender of the writer is self-evident, the aforementioned modernity of women’s literature excludes women’s classical poetry before the May 4th Movement, including those represented by Qiu Jin before and after the 1911 Revolution. Works that meet the demands for women's liberation should be historically regarded as the bud or precursor of Chinese women's literature. How should the modern connotation of women's literature be summarized? When Western feminist criticism and my country began to discuss this concept in the mid-1980s, it was generally believed that it should be a work that reflects female consciousness. Elizabeth Janeway believed that it depends on her experience and understanding of the life content she writes about whether it is female. . In view of the ambiguity of the concepts of female consciousness and gender consciousness, I think it should be restricted by the word "modern" in front of it. This excludes those works written by modern and contemporary female writers that embody traditional male-centered consciousness. 〔9〕
Female literature is not a concept of subject matter. Human life is participated in and maintained by the co-existence of men and women. Although history has established a hierarchical and rigid positioning of the roles of men/women and society/family, it is difficult to completely divide any area of ??life into pure Male or purely female subject matter, any woman's problems relate to men, and vice versa. The essence of subject matter determinism is subject matter hierarchy theory, that is, the hierarchical binary opposition model of public/individual, collective/private etc. The former seems to be male territory while the latter seems destined to belong to women. Lu Yin, Xiao Hong, etc. have all been criticized for this. In recent years, this phenomenon of scorning female literature based on the hierarchical theory of subject matter has obviously heated up, and various names with "small" and "private" as the central words have appeared ("little women's prose", "private novels", "female sketches", etc.) . In fact, the subject matter itself does not matter in terms of value. What is important is not what to write but how to write it and how well it is written? The difference between women's writing and men's writing in this regard is not in the subject matter but in women. Generally speaking, women are accustomed to dealing with various subjects in various aspects of life from an internal perspective, personal memory, and personal survival experience.
Now we can discuss Chinese women’s literature and what categories of forms actually emerged in the process of modernity. Women's literature is closely related to the history of our country in the 20th century. It is impossible to escape from the constraints of various historical forces and can only make different choices under different conditions given by history, thus showing the richness of the modernity process. As Terry Eagleton said, "Language is not a well-defined and clearly defined structure that contains symmetrical units of the expressor and the expressed. It now seems more like an infinitely unfolding spider web. The components are constantly exchanged and circulated, and no component is absolutely limited. Everything is restrained and affected by various other things." [10] On this "infinitely unfolding spider web", some components develop, and some develop. Some components disappear and reappear, some new components appear, develop or disappear, and some components mutate and become something other than what they were originally. "Women", "women" and "feminism" are the three important "knots" in the spider web of the development process of women's literature. In the process of modernity of Chinese women's literature, three forms can be sorted out: women's literature, women's literature, and feminist literature.
“Female” is the core concept of women’s literature and women’s literary criticism. Are it synonymous and interchangeable with the concept of “woman”? In fact, these two concepts are basically used synonymously here. The confusion between the two concepts of women and women reflects from a small aspect the indifference and disregard of female literary modernity in female literary criticism.
According to the research of American poststructuralist scholar Bai Lu, our country did not have the concept of "women" until the late Qing Dynasty. The dominant discourse in Chinese society does not have a concept of women that transcends social human relations. All words referring to women refer to women in specific family human relations, such as daughters who are second to their sons, wives who are second to their husbands, and wives who are second to their husbands. Father, mother, etc., only by acting in accordance with the role norms stipulated in the kinship relationship can everyone act in accordance with the role norms recognized by society, and can they obtain a role position recognized by society.
The word "female" and personal pronouns such as "he, she, tā＠③" appeared in the "May 4th" New Culture Movement. They are one of the themes of modern vernacular literature. They are a subject that transcends the category of kinship and human ethics and transcends traditional patriarchal ideology. It is a revolutionary and rebellious symbol for women's social role positioning, [11] and it is also a concept that needs to be developed and completed. From some papers and literary works in the 1920s and 1930s, we can see that the concept of "women" is different from the dependent identity of traditional women who adhere to the three cardinal principles and five constant principles. In order to distinguish themselves from the old traditional women, some texts often include Adding the word "new" in front of "female" makes "new women" synonymous with "modern women". Bai Lu also pointed out the negative connotations of the word "female" such as passivity, weakness, intellectual and physical incompetence, etc. This is precisely the ambiguous and unstable meaning of the concept of women, which is filled in by male prejudice during the application process. .
Bai Lu also examined the changes in the connotation of the concept of "woman". In traditional discourse, women are generally referred to as women, women, women, and the word woman also refers to traditional women. The concept of women analyzed by Bai Lu was added after the "May 4th" New Culture Movement. She pointed out that the early Communists translated Woman in European socialist political theory as women, emphasizing the relationship between social production and women. The translation of Bebel's "Women and Socialism" laid the foundation for the word "woman" The political meaning of the term "women" was mainly used in this sense in the rural base areas in the 1930s, the Soviet regime, and even the state, women's federation and other political institutions in Mao Zedong's era. [12] "Women can hold up half the sky" is used in the sense of productive labor and political functions.
It can be seen that although the two words "female" and "women" both refer to the gender of "woman", their connotations are not the same and they are not in the same discourse system. The former is different from the old style Women's subjectivity is the essential connotation, and the latter is an ideological discourse politicized by the discourse of state power. In Japan, the concept of women generally refers to old-fashioned women who have not been liberated; while women generally refer to new-style women in modern society who have achieved a certain degree of liberation. [13] In a general sense, there should be such a general difference when we use these two words today.
The connotations of the two concepts "women" and "women" are precisely related to the historical evolution of women's literature from the "May 4th" to the "Cultural Revolution" in 10 years