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Female Consciousness and Power Dynamics: A Study of Chinese Women’s Literature in the 1990s

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This study examines the reconstruction of female consciousness in 1990s Chinese women's literature through feminist literary criticism and Foucauldian discourse analysis, contextualized within China’s socioeconomic transformations and selective engagement with Western feminist theories. By analyzing narrative strategies that reconfigure patriarchal power dynamics, the research reveals how writers subverted traditional gender roles through re-imagined kinship relations, autobiographical politicization, and symbolic syntheses of global feminist frameworks with indigenous cultural paradigms. Key findings demonstrate literature’s role in mediating China’s gendered modernity, establishing dialectical models that contested patriarchal-state collusion while transcending East-West theoretical binaries. The study highlights the paradoxical nature of feminist textual production as both a product of cultural globalization and resistance to Western epistemological dominance. Future research should prioritize cross-cultural comparisons and intergenerational reception studies to further contextualize this literary movement within transnational feminist discourse.
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