Read “From Self to ‘Gendered Self’: Women’s Tragedy Under Patriarchy as Depicted in Raise the Red Lantern“.

Ella Zhang’s “From Self to ‘Gendered Self’: Women’s Tragedy Under Patriarchy as Depicted in Raise the Red Lantern” astonished me when I encountered it sandwiched in my pile of PoH Tales of Gender and Power final research essays. True, Judith Butler’s seminal essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” had been our first crucial text of the semester, so we had often returned to reflect on it as we moved through our kaleidoscope of gender-inflected course texts. Certainly, to honorably consider Butler’s pathbreaking theory of gender constitution is a worthwhile intellectual activity on its own. Yet to then, as Ella does, wield Butler’s complex theoretical lens to critique a literary masterpiece, moves her essay to a notably higher level of inquiry and discourse.

Actually, Ella’s ambitious, well-researched essay accomplishes even more: it bravely harnesses Butler’s late twentieth-century West-rooted theory to venture into a cross-cultural and transhistorical analysis. To do so, she turns to Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern, a film set in Republican China and populated by characters mired in China’s millennia-old patriarchal tradition. Ella’s object—and the laudable success of her essay—is not merely to make sense of the tragic, gender-determined conse-quences of heroine Songlian’s progressive psychological disintegration in her coerced concubinage. It is to deploy Butler’s theory to identify and expose the socially and culturally codified gender politics that corroded the lives of Republican-era Chinese women who, like Songlian, dared reach past China’s ancient patriarchal tradition hoping for a full and unconstrained expression of self.

Songlian’s efforts may have failed, with heartbreaking consequences. But Ella’s mission of re-demption—to establish Songlian’s right to the conscious constitution of her most authentic self, gendered as it must be—richly succeeds.

—Amy Goldman, Lecturer in the Writing Program

Read “Taking Ownership of Female Sexuality in Dirty Computer“.

Read “The Little Black Dress: An Embodiment of Femininity”.

The third unit in my Writing as Inquiry class, titled “Object Lesson,” asked students to examine the history of an everyday physical object in order to develop a broader argument about the object’s cultural, social, and political significance; in the terms of a TED video series that was one of our models for this kind of work, students were asked to find a “big idea” within a “small thing.” Ishita’s “The Little Black Dress: An Embodiment of Femininity” is an exemplary fulfillment of the expectations of this assignment. The first thing that stands out is her vivid and elegant scene-setting in the opening paragraphs, where she locates her chosen object – the little black dress or LBD – within an iconic cultural image, and reveals its crucial but potentially overlooked presence there. What follows is a deft interweaving of cultural history and sophisticated engagement with complex arguments. Ishita manages to situate the story of the LBD within a broader social history of gender, while grounding a foundational modern intra-feminist debate about femininity in this concrete narrative. She manages to engage thoughtfully with opposing positions while advancing a subtle but cogent case of her own. This is an impressively multifaceted contribution to our understanding of the object as well as the larger questions Ishita brings to bear on it.

—Geoff Shullenberger, Lecturer in the Writing Program

Read “Bubbles Never Touch the Sky: Shanghai Ladies and Class Mobility”.