摘要
本文分析了20世纪之交,作为"中国通"或者说作为中国专家的西方女性笔下对中国女性的描述。这些文本均可被归为性别实践,其来源囊括了回忆录、传教士报道、照片和绘画,无疑维系了帝国主义、殖民主义和传教事业,但其重点和意义也超越了这些话语。西方女性运用了所谓"跨国家庭生活"的方式,在中国找到了一个特权舞台,在这里,她们可以充分发挥自己的潜力,而不必向由男性主导的父权社会证明自己的正当性。在西方女性运用大量的修辞形象和话语转义来描绘中国,以求迎合西方读者时,这些作品也展现出西方女性通过书写中国女性来体现自身独特性并重塑自我的多重愿景。这也许有助于理解西方女性如何塑造中国的东方主义形象,以及她们在这一过程中所起的作用。这些维多利亚时代由西方女性执笔的有关中国女性的书籍,并不仅仅是不寻常而杰出的人物所书写的娱乐性作品,抑或是传教事业的一部分。相反,它们澄清并阐明了跨国文化互动的复杂驱动力,无论在过去还是当下,这一驱动力仍然在中国、西方、女性、种族和性别等领域中发挥着作用。
This paper analyzes representations of Chinese women by Western women in their role of"China-hands",i.e.,experts on China at the turn of the twentieth century.These sources,ranging in genre from memoirs to missionary reports,from photographs to paintings,are marked by gendered practices which undeniably sustained imperialism,colonialism,and the missionary enterprise,but whose focus and significance also transcend these discourses.Western women,deploying the rhetoric of what we can now call transnational domesticities,found in China a privileged arena in which they could display their full operational potentials without having to justify them to their male-dominated,patriarchal society.While revealing a textual universe in which a vast array of rhetorical figures and discursive tropes were employed by Western women to represent and know China for the benefit of Western audiences,they also show the plurality of visions by which these women fashioned their distinctions and reinvented themselves by writing about Chinese women.This effort might help in understanding how Western women helped to create Orientalist images of China as well as their contribution to orientalism.The books about Chinese women that Western women of the Victorian era wrote were not just entertaining works written by eccentric and remarkable characters,or just part of the missionary enterprise,but clarify and illuminate the complex dynamics of transnational cultural interactions that were-and still are-at work among China,the West,women,Woman,race,and gender.
出处
《全球史评论》
2019年第1期45-87,361,共44页
Global History Review
作者简介
曾佩琳[Paola Zamperini],美国西北大学亚洲洲语言和文化学系副教授;陈昊天,译者,首都师范大学历史学院硕士研究生
