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Gender Female is a
story about a mother and her seven daughters, whom she bears one after
the other in order to satisfy her husband’s wish for a son. Each
daughter leads a life unlike the others’, but whether in childbirth,
forced marriage, lost love, sexual impassivity or, finally, death,
they suffer disturbingly similar forms of discrimination and
persecution. The book is highly critical of the traditional norms and
patriarchal culture pervasive throughout China. Heartrending in parts,
Gender: Female distinguishes itself from other contemporary
writing about Chinese women in the demands it places on its
characters, both female and male, to achieve emotional and sexual
equality. The publication of the novel in its original Chinese
attracted attention from both the academia and the general public.
Broad and profound, this novel has been called by critics a rare genre
painting of the oppression and proscriptive sexual history of women in
China.
The author,
Wang Zhousheng, is a Chinese writer now living in Shanghai, China.
After working on a state farm in rural China for many years during the
Cultural Revolution, Wang Zhousheng later lived in Philadelphia and
Los Angeles during the 1980s while accompanying her husband on his
studies. She graduated from the School of Literature at Shanghai
University majoring in culture management and is currently an
associate researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Literature, Shanghai
Academy of Social Sciences. She is also a board member of the Shanghai
Writer's Association. Wang Zhousheng has written more than ten books,
including The
Student's Wife (novel),
Madam Red (collection
of short stories) and The Trace of a
Smile (collection
of essays). She is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, such
as the Shanghai Novel-Nouvelle Award (1994) and the Tianjin Novel
Monthly Bai Hua Award (1995 and 1997).
Critics Comments
Readers Comments
Extract
Copyright © Wang
Zhousheng
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