CHINESE WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES

It is well known that China has implemented a Family Planning policy. Chinese women have limited options in reproduction, and their agency is constrained by the government, the medical institutions, and the traditional Chinese patriarchal and biased culture. By utilizing rhetorical analysis as a primary methodology with a focus on rhetorical agency, this dissertation analyzes two cases where digital technologies such as social media and apps facilitate users’ rhetorical agency to counter instances of reproductive injustice. First, I focus on China’s most popular pregnancy and mothering app, Babytree, to examine how the app rhetorically positions its users to enable empowerment and how users engage with the app by writing their embodied pregnant and mothering experience into online narratives and “selling” them to generate income, and the possibilities that they seek meaningful changes in the context of the app. Second, I investigate how a new Chinese mother with postpartum depression used the craft of crocheting to identify with other depressed mothers and they worked together to use their crocheted artifacts to do a large-scale installation to raise the public’s awareness and combat the dominant biased culture that stigmatizes postpartum depression. These Chinese women adopt different rhetorical strategies to integrate their embodied experiences into medical knowledge to attract users’ attention and to recast their embodied experiences as material rhetoric to raise the public’s awareness. They take advantage of technological affordances on the app and social media to combat dominant discourses and promote reproductive justice. I argue that these Chinese women economize and materialize their embodied experience of pregnancy and motherhood, which may alter gender oppression in patriarchal and biased cultural discourses and shows a powerful feminist rhetorical agency. Meanwhile, this research also aids in theorizing how reproductive injustice occurs in relation to institutional and cultural oppression in different cultures and groups, and how digital spaces are an ideal place for women to assert rhetorical agency in enacting intercultural communication of reproductive justice

Making Space for Women's History: The Digital-Material Rhetoric of the National Women's History (Cyber)Museum

abstract: The struggle of the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) to make space for women’s history in the United States is in important ways emblematic of the struggle for recognition and status of American women as a whole. Working at the intersections of digital-material memory production and using the NWHM as a focus, this dissertation examines the significance of the varied strategies used by and contexts among which the NWHM and entities like it negotiate for digital, material, and rhetorical space within U.S. public memory production. As a “cybermuseum,” the NWHM functions within national public memory production at the intersections of material and digital culture; yet as an activist institution in search of a permanent, physical “home” for women’s history, the NWHM also counterproductively reifies existing gendered norms that make such an achievement difficult. By examining selected aspects of this complexly situated entity, this dissertation makes visible the gendered nature of public memory production, the digital and material components of that production, and the hybrid nature of emerging public memory entities which operate simultaneously in multiple spheres. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and guided by Carole Blair’s work on rhetorical materiality, this dissertation explores key aspects of the NWHM’s process of becoming, including an examination of the centrality of the interpellation of publics to the rhetorical materiality of public discourse; an analysis of the material state of public memory production in national history museums in the U.S.; and an exploration of the embodied engagement that undergirds all interaction with and presentation of historical artifacts and narratives, whether digital, physical or both at once. In a synthesis of findings, this dissertation describes a set of key characteristics through which certain hybrid digital-material entities (including the NWHM) enact increasingly complex variations of rhetorical agency. These characteristics suggest a need for a more flexible analytic framework, described in the final chapter. This framework takes shape as an heuristic of functions across which digital-material entities always already enact a situated, active, embodied, and simultaneous agency, one that can account fully for the rhetorical processes through which space is “made” for women in U.S. public memory.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation English 201

Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women’s Rhetoric Revisited: A Case for an Enlightened Feminist Rhetorical Theory

Identifying the specific complexities and historical context of post-Mao Chinese literary women\u27s rhetoric, along with ways they have been misread, the author argues in general that Western feminist critics need to be cautious about applying their concepts to non-Western women\u27s literature

Negotiating New Asian American Masculinities: Attitudes and Gender Expectations

The article examines how Asian-American men construct their own masculinities. Changes in Asian-American heterosexual masculinity are of great interest within the Asia-American communities and to the general public. Historically this racialized masculinity was both hypermasculanized and desexualized as a way to limit economic and racial opportunities in the U.S. While these dichotomous ideas about Asian-American masculinities are still pervasive new articulations of what it means to be male, straight, and Asian American are affecting different Asian-American communities and interpersonal relationships at home and in workplaces. Issues of Asian- American masculinities are brought up in relation to interracial dating and marriage, expectations about supporting the family and community, sexual violence within the home and sexual harassment in public spaces, racial violence stemming from economic scapegoating and white supremacist ideology, mass media portrayals of Asian-American men, and complexities about ethnic identity and politics

Developing Transnational Feminist Dialogues: How Chinese Women Craft Identity at the Intersection of Tradition, Socialism, and Globalization

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

Post/Feminist Impulses: Neoliberal Ideology and Class Politics in Annie Wang’s \u3cem\u3eThe People’s Republic of Desire\u3c/em\u3e (2006)

This paper critically examines post/feminist imperatives in relation to neoliberal ethos and class dynamics in The People’s Republic of Desire (2006) by transnational Chinese women writer, Annie Wang (b. 1972). While the novel positions itself as a transnational satire of the Western-styled consumptive furor in post-socialist China, its textual focus on a class-based commodity culture demands a critical consideration of its neoliberal investments. In probing Wang’s text, this paper adopts a feminist reading that attends to how neoliberal ideology and class politics operate together to corroborate a postfeminist stance. The awareness of feminist ethics notwithstanding, the text’s overall postfeminist disposition and the attendant class purview work to depoliticize its expressed intent. The tension between feminism and postfeminism eventually translates into that between the local and the global. That the discursive polarization of China and the West is implicitly inscribed in the denouement also registers the limits of the novel’s transnational engagement

Multiculturalism and the formation of a diasporic counterpublic in Roy K. Kiyooka's StoneDGloves

This essay considers how recent diasporic writing has questioned the liberal democratic claims of Canada’s multicultural policies to recognise the history and culture of its diasporic citizens. At the core of the essay is a detailed reading of Roy Kiyooka’s catalogue of poems and photographs, StoneDGloves (1970), which considers how Kiyooka traces a history of race-labour in the foundations of the Canadian nation state, and attempts to redress state policies of racial exclusion and discrimination in Canada’s national narrative. But the essay also supplements this reading with a discussion of the ways in which the history of race-labour migrancy and the discourse of racial exclusion is figured in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Roy Miki’s Random Access File (1995). In so doing, I suggest that these texts contribute to the formation of a diasporic counterpublic, or a rhetorical site for articulating histories of migration and racialization

Rhetorical approaches to gender and human rights in contemporary transnational literature and cultural studies

This dissertation extends the conversations surrounding human rights literature and its intersection with transnational gender studies and rhetorical theories. It does so through extended analyses of literary accounts of human rights abuses from Iran, South Africa, and Burma including Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Sindiwe Magona's "Women at Work", and Wendy Law-Yone's The Road to Wanting. The project brings together these disparate global locations and scholarly fields by analyzing the pedagogical imperative that underwrites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent instruments. This pedagogy gives rise to a normative discourse and culture of rights, one that is both productive and problematic. The human rights literature under examination emerge out of that normative discourse of rights and both participate in and speak back to that normativity. Thus, the dissertation examines how narratives as cultural productions are both pedagogical and performative of the normative culture of human rights. Specifically, the dissertation brings transnational feminist discourses of selfhood as process rather than product, theories of identification, and visual rhetorics directly to bear on human rights concerns by rethinking rhetorical theories of both the speaking subject and transnational reader responsibility. In so doing it brings together and extends Judith Butler's concepts of post-sovereign subjectivity, Pheng Cheah's articulation of human rights as embedded in discourses of global capital, and theories of witness and rhetorical listening. Through a rhetorical approach to human rights literature informed by gender studies, this dissertation ultimately considers how these narrative representations also construct a transnational feminist readership. This readership recognizes the ways in which the texts that emerge out of the human rights regime can draw attention to, complicate, and/or remake that discourse

The Use of Violence as Feminist Rhetoric: Third-Wave Feminism in Tarantino\u27s Kill Bill Films

For the purpose of this thesis, the main focus of the feminist rhetorical criticism method was specifically linked to gender-related power inequities. This method was especially appropriate for the analysis of how film violence is used as a feminist rhetorical strategy in the Kill Bill films. This thesis is more closely aligned with challenging rhetorical standards as it sought to identify feminist counter positions of rhetoric in film violence