Female university students from rural China, a discursive-affective ethnography of gendered subjectivity of formation
Date
2023
Authors
Li, Wenfei
Editors
Advisors
Schulz, Samantha
Kelly, Stephen
Kelly, Stephen
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Thesis
Citation
Statement of Responsibility
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Abstract
Gender inequality remains a significant issue in China that circumscribes female experiences and life choices, particularly women from rural areas. In this post-Mao era, China is confronted with diverse and plural gender dynamics, with traditional and contemporary gender discourses coactive in shaping gendered subjectivity. Discourses of virtue, class, rurality and urbanisation construct female subjectivities in complex and unjust ways, and both formal and informal educational sites are spaces where these relations are mediated. This study explores the ways in which gender ‘matters’ for Chinese female university students from rural areas. The study elucidates how gender becomes a site via which cultural, social, historical, political, media, and nationalistic discourses intersect within and beyond formal educational institutions to shape the lives of Chinese female university students from rural areas. The study explores: gendered discourses that circulate through these sites. How discourses of gender are entangled with affects/emotions such that gender identity is a product of affective power relations. And how Chinese female university students from rural areas negotiate these dynamics to construct and reconstruct their subjectivities. The study constitutes a modified ethnography that draws upon the experiences of 21 young Chinese women from rural areas attending university in the region of Henan. Employing Foucauldian notions of discourse, power/knowledge, and subjectivity alongside gender and affect theories, the study investigates the discursive-affective production of rural university women’s subjectivities. Data are generated from a combination of interviews, observations, and participant photo diaries, and these research materials are analysed using an affective-discursive orientation to discourse analysis. The first portion of the thesis establishes the historical context of gender formation in China. It traces the influence of the traditional patriarchal system of Confucianism, the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party with its emphasis on collective good and gender equality, the ensuing ascendance of market logics, the revival of Confucianism, and a shift in focus from collective to individual good, as well as the ways in which rural-urban divisions shape the conditions of possibility for Chinese women and girls. Drawing on the notion that present events have their historical traces, the second part of the thesis utilises this backdrop to examine the lived experiences of its research participants. The thesis explores how the university campus establishes conditions of possibility for subject formation, and how these conditions are embedded in discourse, constitutive social acts, and in forces that include emotions and affects. The thesis argues that although university education for its research participants does not provide formal learning around gender equity, it does provide conditions of possibility for resisting and reworking dominant discourses of gender. Although participants are confronted with multiple gendering discourses on and off campus – such as (1) patriotic discourses which encourage women to subordinate femininity to masculinity; (2) urban-rural discourses that encourage docility and domestic subjugation amongst rural women; and (3) Confucian discourses that construct women as vulnerable objects to be gazed upon and disciplined through sexual morality – counter discourses circulate through campus life in ways that enable participants to subversively and creatively reclaim gendered ground.
School/Discipline
School of Education
Dissertation Note
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Education, 2023
Provenance
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