Genealogy of hungry women writers and artists: rethinking Chinese modernity through the arts of female hunger

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary and multimedia project examining literary work, independent documentary, and new media content authored by Chinese women writers and artists, whose lives and works have been conditioned by corporeal experiences of hunger from the beleaguered Republican era to the contemporary age of affluence. It argues that the corporeal and performative authorship of hungry women writers and artists belies the reductive victimization and stigmatization of female hunger in the representative tradition of modern Chinese literature and culture, and that the art of female hunger complicates the romanticizing trope of the hungry young artist in the Euro-American literary tradition by intersecting the poetic with the political. It. Mapping the genealogy of hungry women writers and artists throughout the long twentieth century, under varying circumstances of poverty, famine, social restructuring, and consumer culture, the dissertation reexamines Chinese modernity from the marginalized position of the hungry others and reconfigures Chinese modernity in tandem with media evolution from print to the Internet. The way female hunger is represented in modern literary and visual works compels us to rethink Chinese modernity as an embodied historical process, which women have experienced on bodily and quotidian levels. It is imperative, historically and ethically, for us to explore the abject experiences of the hungry others against the shifting social and geopolitical structures, especially when China is quickly transforming into a society of affluence.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference