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Introduction
The study of women in twentieth-century China has expanded so quickly in the past two decades that a state-of-the-field survey becomes outdated in the time that it takes to assemble and write one. This burgeoning area of inquiry draws its inspiration and approaches from many sources outside "the China field," a realm no longer hermetically sealed within exclusive logics of sinology or area studies. Research about Chinese women has been enriched by the growth of women's studies abroad and in China; by debates about gender as a category of analysis and its uneasy relationship to sex and sexuality; by conversations inside established scholarly disciplines about gender's entanglement with politics, migration, nation building, and modernity; by discussions across the disciplines about agency, resistance, subjectivity, and voice; and by several waves of refigured Marxism in the wake of feminist activity, the demise of socialism, and the development of postcolonial scholarship. During the same period, available sources and opportunities for research and fieldwork in China have expanded for both Chinese scholars and foreigners, giving rise to scholarly conversations that sometimes intersect and sometimes trace utterly separate trajectories.
To complicate a state-of-the-field project even further, writing about women routinely crosses disciplinary boundaries. For China the disciplines that investigate "women" shift with the period of time under investigation as well as with changing disciplinary norms. History, for instance, used to stop at the edge of the People's Republic of China (PRC), where the pursuit of knowledge was handed over to social scientists. Now historians often traverse the 1949 divide, borrowing methods from anthropology and literature. Still, most studies of women in reform-era China are produced by anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of contemporary literature.
The field being surveyed here, then, ranges within and across disciplines. The emergence of women's studies has enabled many of these projects, but not all the scholars discussed herein locate themselves in a women's studies field. This situation of crumbling boundaries presents some not-so-innocent taxonomical choices: To follow the interdisciplinary practices of women's studies and risk a runaway bibliography? To draw on categories of analysis developed in non-China contexts, including the categories of "woman" and "gender" themselves, and risk analytical imperialism? To stay within the national boundaries of China (but which twentieth-century boundaries should we choose?)...