Conceptualising State Feminism in China: Possibilities and Challenges

Abstract

As state feminism is always discussed with reference to institutionalised politics, an important criterion for recognising state feminism is the capacity to initiate feminist goals and achieve them through engaging the process of policymaking. While discursive institutionalism tends to examine the relationship among actors in institutional structures from a communicative power perspective, this has not been widely applied to understand how state feminism is constructed through discursive power. There is very little such work considering these questions with reference to China. This thesis takes a first attempt at combining frameworks that analyse discursive power and state feminism in the Chinese context. This perspective tackles a larger question of whether a reciprocity between the state’s interests and feminist interests is possible. Beyond evaluating the effectiveness of women’s institutions, it is also important to look at the wider social-cultural environment and the political factors affecting how the state feminism framework has been shaped within particular historical conjunctures. Attending to the workings of feminism within the state, this thesis particularly considers the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF), a Chinese Communist Party-led monopoly women’s organisation. Based on material and historical analysis of selected campaigns, this thesis suggests that the ACWF has been a contradictory agent which attempts to carry out feminist practise within the state by constantly seeking spaces for women’s representation, but also simultaneously represents the party-state’s discursive closure in defining what matters for women. In addition to these discursive and historical inquiries, this thesis employs Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-structuralist political theory to argue that state feminism in China should not be understood simply as a substantial institutional operation, but rather as the product of a discursive field in which its meaning is continually signified by changing hegemonic discourses across periods of cultural and political change. State feminism itself, I argue, is constituted at a symbolic level as a practice of articulations.