The Personal Interview

In this innovative book, a well-known feminist and sociologist-who is also the founding editor of Gender & Society-challenges our most basic assumptions about gender. Judith Lorber argues that gender is wholly a product of socialization, subject to human agency, organization, and interpretation, and that it is a social institution comparable to the economy, the family, and religion in its significance and consequences. Calling into question the inevitability and necessity of gender, she envisions a society structured for equality, where no gender, racial ethnic, or social class group is allowed to monopolize positions of power.

Paradoxes of gender

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Aihwa Ong. Durham, NIC: Duke University Press, 1999. ix. 322 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Research on transitional socialist societies has explored trends in income inequality and issues concerning who gains and who loses during market reforms. We find that income inequality in a major Chinese city declined only slightly during the first decade of reform policies; it then increased dramatically in the subsequent five years. Strategic position in the state bureaucracy continues to be an important determinant of income, although connections to the market system are becoming alternate sources of advantage. We interpret these findings in light of the historical and institutional context of urban China

Market transition and the persistence of power: The changing stratification system in urban China

This essay draws on interviews with women in rural Shaanxi conducted since 1996 in collaboration with Gao Xiaoxian research office director of the Shaanxi Provincial Womens Federation. Our research has centered on four villages in central and southern Shaanxi each with a different local economy and degree of proximity to state organizations. In locating research sites were relied on the cooperation of county Womens Federation branches and on the consent of county officials. In each village the ease with which people greeted and talked to us was a product both of Gaos standing in the Womens Federation she has logged many years of work in rural areas) and of how we had arrived under official aegis. Nevertheless we interviewed without official impediment or presence of any kind villages are generally not the preferred venue of officials from "above"). No one sat in on our interviews or tried to direct us to particular interview subjects unless we asked for help. No one in an official position told older women what to say to us or kept track of what they had said (although intelligence about us circulated incessantly through each village; earlier interviewees gave later ones free advice about what might interest us later interviewees complained that they had been misrepresented by earlier ones and so forth). Our interlocators were not shy in their willingness to be critical of state policies past and present. Nor were they reluctant to provide long accounts of conflicts with family members neighbors and officials. We benefited from the oft-noted phenomenon that people may choose to say things to an outsider they would not say to their next-door neighbor because the outsider a transient will not reveal their secrets locally. Of course our interviews were influenced in specific ways by my obvious foreignness as well as by Gaos status as an urban woman who works for a "mass" organization and we paid a great deal of attention to interchanges where this was a factor. But for many interviewees the fact of an audience interested in long-neglected stories obviously took precedence over all other considerations. (excerpt)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/340906

The gender of memory: rural Chinese women and the 1950s.

FOR CHINA SCHOLARS, JOAN SCOTTrr's WORK has been less a roadmap than a working guide on how to bushwhack and read partially obscured tracks. The specific ways in which Scott's insights might be applied depend on the terrain, as well as the eye of the explorer. "Gender" as scholarly practice, no less than "gender" as category, requires historical analysis. In recent China scholarship, gender (the concept) has proven extremely productive of new knowledge in both Englishand Chinese-language writing, but "Gender" (Scott's specific working guide) has been less influential in Chinese-language scholarship than in the Anglophone world. The scholarly trajectory of gender in Euro-American (primarily U.S.-based) historical scholarship differs from that in the People's Republic of China. These are not hermetically sealed scholarly geographies-cross-talk between these two locales, as well as with scholars in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere, has been important, as was an earlier wave of traveling feminist theories in the early twentieth century.' What follows, however, is not an attempt at comprehensive coverage. Tracing out two distinct but entangled contemporary scholarly formations is complex enough, and perhaps can suggest ways in which others might further expand the conversation.

Chinese History: A Useful Category of Gender Analysis

The gender of memory

Shanghai has been called "the key to modern China" (Murphey, 1953) because of its rapid expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its importance as an industrial and commercial center, its extensive exposure to foreign economic and cultural influences, and its role as a hotbed of the radical politics that eventually shaped the Chinese revolution. Yet although recent scholarship has done a great deal to illuminate various aspects of Shanghai's modern growth, large parts of its history remain hidden from view, among them the history of women's experience outside the industrial sphere. By some estimates numbering 100,000 in the 1930s, prostitutes made up arguably the single most numerous of all female groups living and working in the city. Although less visible and more diverse than the ranks of Shanghai cotton-mill workers, they were no less crucial to the city's development. Their labor helped to support their families, promoted the development of commercial and service establishments, and lined the pockets of the police and the powerful underworld gangs that controlled much of the urban economy. If

The Hierarchy of Shanghai Prostitution, 1870-1949:

Concubines and Bondservants: The Social History of a Chinese Custom . By Maria Jaschok. London: Zed Books Ltd., 1988. ii, 156 pp. $49.00 (cloth); $15.00 (paper).

Gail Hershatter

Papers

The gender of memory: rural Chinese women and the 1950s.

Chinese History: A Useful Category of Gender Analysis

The gender of memory

The Hierarchy of Shanghai Prostitution, 1870-1949:

Concubines and Bondservants: The Social History of a Chinese Custom . By Maria Jaschok. London: Zed Books Ltd., 1988. ii, 156 pp. $49.00 (cloth); $15.00 (paper).