Embodying Pain: Chinese Women Writers’ Articulations and Memories of Mao-Era Suffering

ongoing

This project explores Chinese women writers’ articulations and recollections of pain from the 1950s through the 1980s. The focus is on heretofore neglected or understudied life writing by women who had become established cultural workers before the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and had witnessed or suffered punishment in the mid- or late 1950s. Mei Zhi’s (1914-2004) account of her husband Hu Feng’s political exile in Sichuan and Ding Ling’s (1904-1986) memories of her experience at a labor camp in Beidahuang, Manchuria, are a few examples of women writers’ personal narratives of Mao-era suffering, and among the key texts that this project intends to analyze. Traditionally marginalized within Chinese literary histories and canons, these texts offer a unique entry point into how Chinese women have brought life writing to bear on experiences of suffering. Drawing on literary and gender studies, memory theories, pain studies, and histories of emotions, senses, and experience, this project highlights the potential of these texts for rethinking the place of the female body in life writing that stems from or evokes authoritarian and disciplinary contexts. In historicizing these women writers’ embodied articulations and recollections of pain, this project adopts an interdisciplinary methodology centered on the notion of affective experience to reveal the dynamic relationship between context, lived experience, and writing. This relational model will draw attention to women’s creative strategies of negotiation and survival from within the system, beyond clear-cut divisions between compliance and resistance under duress. Finally, by attending to a wide range of emotions and solidarities that can grow out of pain situations, this project will unravel the therapeutic potential and the limits of life writing, with far-reaching implications in the interdisciplinary fields of gender studies, pain studies, and medical humanities, as well as in society at large.