Reviews

Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women by

somacula's review

I read this because I wanted to understand how feminists in China conceive of gender, but the majority of what they expressed were sentiments that I had already encountered in western feminist literature. I think that’s a very important learning on its own, although I wonder if that’s limited only to the kinds of feminism in the anthology. I noticed some of the authors featured are quite conservative—one expresses admiration for Margaret Thatcher and another is clearly a student of radical feminism (yes, radical feminism is primarily a western project, and yes she mentioned reading western feminist literature), complete with a throwaway line dissing transgender people. I don’t regret reading this because learning about how conservative feminism is expressed by Chinese writers was very valuable, but I don’t think this anthology shows the full political spectrum of feminism either and as such is just one part of the answer to my question. I do understand it’s probably obvious past a certain early point that this is a conservative-leaning anthology, and people should either commit or jump ship accordingly instead of complaining, but I felt it was still valuable for me to finish and talk about.