New Voices Series: Xuefei Ma

Feminist Sinophone critiques, while challenging the overdetermined categories of “China/Chineseness,” “woman,” or “feminism,” may paradoxically risk aestheticization within neoliberal multiculturalism without an epistemic and material challenge to the very structures that produce them. Thinking alongside this literature, I draw from the culture of nüshu ((“??/??”, literally “women’s writing” or “scripts,” a kind of mosquito-shaped, gendered scripts different from Chinese characters) and coin the term the Sinosquare.

A portmanteau of sinophonicity and square, the Sinosquare immediately retrieves the theoretical residues on gender (“??”) and writing and carries a feminist, double misidentification with the hierarchical order produced by their theorization and with monolingual epistemologies centered around square words. It describes a Sinophone feminist spatiality grounded in the relational aesthetics of female homosociality, where voices, touches, times, and scripts meet. In(to) the Sinosquare, reconfigured inscription across artistic media and in everyday life reveals how women's expressions and material changes intra-act with the local and global power-inflicted networks.

In this talk, by telling the stories of my collaboration with a nüshu practitioner, Hu Meiyue, on two Misery Laments (a pivotal genre in the nüshu literature) and discussing the ways rural, senior women’s precaritized agency emanates from bonding over negative affects such as the pitiful and the useless, I analyze how, in(to) the Sinosquare, the hierarchical relations between Chinese and nüshu scripts in the local tourist economy are undone and the positive affects promoted by the Chinese government’s vision of a harmonious society disrupted.

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