Engendering China. Il genere come categoria di analisi nella storiografia sulla Cina negli ultimi venticinque anni

Women, family, kinship, have always important topics in the sinological scholarship field. The idea of the separation of the sexes was an integral part of the classical Chinese political thought that considered it the foundation of heaven and earth, and of all human relationship. Most of the studies regarded imperial China as a time of unchanging subordination of women. According to this narrative, it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that, thanks to the influence of the West, Chinese women became protagonists of a new cultural, social and political revolution. Since the 90s, the category of gender has been important to revise and move away from what had been defined “The May Fourth Story”, i.e. a portrayal of a victimized woman of old China liberated by reformers and revolutionaries. The most important body of research of women and gender in late imperial China has mainly focused on elite women of the most economically and culturally advanced region in China at the time. Since the end of 90s, thanks to the opening of archives and libraries in the 80s, and the access to new kind of sources, the subject broadened to include women and men from all social stratums. This paper will pay attention to recent contributions that can be considered the summa of a body of scholarship that since the beginning made the claim that research on women and gender does not rest in a corner of sinological endeavors, but should revise the most basic categories through which Chinese social relations, institutions, and cultural productions are understood. As Euro-American historical scholarship differs from that in the People’s Republic of China, the paper will consider especially the difficulties of translating analytic term, such as gender, born in a different intellectual context.