Wang Zheng

Biography:

Wang Zheng is associate professor of History and Women's and Gender Studies and associate scientist of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. A long-term academic activist promoting gender studies in China, she is the director of the UM-China Gender Studies Project, and founder and co-director of the UM-Fudan Joint Institute for Gender Studies at Fudan University, Shanghai. Her English publications concern changing gender discourses and relations in China's socioeconomic, political and cultural transformations of the past century, and feminism in China, both in terms of its historical development and its contemporary activism in the context of globalization. She is the author of Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (UC Press, 1999). Her current project is a gender history of the People’s Republic of China, exploring the relationship between gender and the socialist state formation, and gender and capitalist transformation. She has edited volumes (both in English and Chinese) on a variety of topics: the constructions of feminist subjectivity in socialist China, the politics and effects of translating feminisms in China throughout the twentieth century, and significance of introducing “gender” into the study of Chinese history as well as into the discursive contentions in contemporary China.

Selected Publications:

Books in English:

Translating Feminisms in China, co-edited with Dorothy Ko ( Blackwell Publishing, London, 2007)

Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era, co-edited with Xueping Zhong and Bai Di (Rutgers University Press, Piscataway, 2001)

Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999)

From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society a translation of Fei Xiaotong’s work with an introduction and an epilogue, co-authored with Gary Hamilton (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992

Articles in English

“Global Concepts, Local Practices: Chinese Feminism since the Fourth UN Conference on Women,” co-authored with Ying Zhang, Feminist Studies. Forthcoming.

“Chinese History: A Useful Category of Gender Analysis,” co-authored with Gail Hershatter, The American Historical Review, Vol. 113, No. 5 (December 2008), 1404-1421.

“Dilemmas of Inside Agitators: Chinese State Feminists in 1957,” The China Quarterly, No. 188 (December 2006), 59-78.

“’State Feminism?’ Gender and Socialist State Formation in Maoist China,” Feminist Studies. Vol. 31, no. 3 (fall 2005), 519-551.

“Gender and Maoist Urban Reorganization,” in Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China, eds., Wendy Larson and Bryna Goodman, Rowman and Littlefield Publisher (189-209), 2005.

“Gender, Employment and Women’s Resistance,” in Chinese Society, Second Edition: Change, Conflict and Resistance, eds., Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden, RoutledgeCurzon, London & New York (158-182), 2003

“Call Me Qingnian But Not Funü: A Maoist Youth in Retrospect,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1(spring 2001), 9-34.

“Research on Women in Contemporary China,” in Guide to Women’s Studies in China, Gail Hershatter, et al. eds., Institute of East Asian Studies, Berkeley (1-43), 1998.

“Maoism, Feminism and the UN Conference on Women: Women’s Studies Research in Contemporary China,” in The Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Winter 1997), 126-152.

“A Historic Turning Point of the Women’s Movement in China,” in Signs, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Autumn 1996), 192-199.

Affiliation(s)

• Women's and Gender Studies
• Institute for Research on Women and Gender
• Center for Chinese Studies

Field(s) of Study

• Women and gender in modern China
• Chinese feminism in the context of globalization
• gender and socialist state formation
• comparative histories of feminism