From Women’s Space to Gendering the Public Sphere : Ai Xiaoming’s Practice of Everyday Life and Activism

Summary, in English

How do Chinese activists and intellectuals continue to make a social impact under heightened repression? In particular, how do female activists and intellectuals cope with political repression in addition to the structural gender bias already present in Chinese society? This chapter examines the life and activism of feminist scholar and independent filmmaker Ai Xiaoming. Despite being banned from public life by the Chinese authorities, Ai has made creative use of her residential spaces for social causes while fulfilling her traditional gendered role as the main caregiver in the family. In doing so, she has redrawn the boundaries between the personal and the political, transformed domestic space into semi-public space, created virtual and counter-public spaces, and reinvented the social meaning of her gendered role. As an example of ‘the personal is political’, Ai’s story highlights the gendered bias of the public sphere and invites us to rethink the domestic and the private as spaces where Chinese female intellectuals can make important social interventions.

• Author: Jinyan Zeng; Xibai Xu
• Editor: Jamie J. Zhao; Hongwei Bao
• Department/s: Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University
• Publishing year: 2024-04-09
• Language: English
• Pages: 353-368
• Publication/Series: Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003273943-28
• Document type: Book chapter
• Publisher: Routledge
• Topic: Gender Studies; Political Science (excluding Peace and Conflict Studies); Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Anthropology, Demography and Criminology)
• Keywords: Ai Xiaoming; China; gender; intellectual; space/sphere; practice; activism
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISBN: 9781003273943