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Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism. By LISA ROFEL. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. xvi, 330 pp. $40.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).
Lisa Rofel's long-awaited volume is one which places contemporary Chinese women-or, more accurately, discourse about contemporary Chinese women-firmly within the framework of postmodern theory in anthropology and women's studies. This is a book that will be read well beyond the bounds of China studies and will influentially shape the view of Chinese women's lives held by those working in many areas of cross-cultural study.
Lisa Rofel writes of her encounters with three distinct generations of women factory workers in one large factory in the silk producing center of Hangzhou. She traces their multiple discourses about gender, work, and life as expressed in 1984-86 and 1991. The earliest cohort-women who entered the factory before liberation or during the 1950s-provides insight into the remaking of the sociospatial construction of gender so central to the Chinese dichotomy of inner (woman) and outer (man). These women had disrupted the classic dichotomy both by leaving the inner sphere and by taking work (weaving)...