Gendered Genres: Women’s Poetry in Post-Mao China

The death of Mao Zedong in 1976, followed by the beginning of Reform and Opening Up, sparked a period of intense intellectual energy and literary revival known as ‘cultural fever’ (文化热), when fascination with Western culture mixed with a search for lost roots and collective consciousness gave way to self-expression. During this period, poetry again assumed a pivotal role in shaping new aesthetic forms and modes of expression. Traditionally regarded as ‘embodying the heart of Chinese culture’ (Pirazzoli 2016: 5), poetry had long held the highest position in the literary hierarchy in China, serving as a means of self-cultivation and a symbol of order and civilisation. Yet, because of its strong ties to the classical tradition, after the fall of the Qing Empire in 1912 and amid early twentieth-century modernisation, poetry had come to seem ill-suited to capturing the rapid historical changes.

Although it became fertile ground for linguistic and stylistic experimentation, poetry struggled to find a modern, accessible form. For this reason, its social and cultural functions gradually shifted and it became marginalised in the public sphere throughout much of the twentieth century. With a few notable exceptions—such as the recitation of patriotic poems in the streets during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and the display of poetry on billboards and city walls, as well as the mass production of popular verse during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s—poetry was replaced with fiction as the primary vehicle for social reform and nation-building. This is a primacy maintained to this day thanks to fiction’s adaptability to new media such as film and television (Yeh et al. 2023). However, it was precisely this marginality that enabled poetry to maintain a critical distance from the cultural mainstream, thereby fostering renewed vitality and transforming it into an alternative space of discourse (Yeh 1992: xxiii). After 1976, the equally marginal independent publishing scene further sustained this transformation, when some journals broke away from politically orthodox content and formulaic rhetoric to actively explore new modes of expression and circulate innovative poetic forms.

Against this backdrop, in 1978, one of the earliest and most influential independent magazines of the period, Jintian (今天), published Shu Ting’s (b. 1952) To an Oak (致橡树), a poem that explores the possibility of a gender-equal relationship grounded in women’s autonomy. Using the oak and kapok as metaphors, it describes a new kind of love in which the woman is no longer a ‘trumpet creeper’ who needs the man to reveal herself, nor a ‘perilous peak’ who supports him but fades behind his grandeur. The trees are equal yet distinct, growing side by side, and only by maintaining their uniqueness can they fully love each other:

我如果爱你—
绝不像攀援的凌霄花,
借你的高枝炫耀自己;
我如果爱你—
绝不学痴情的鸟儿,
为绿荫重复单调的歌曲;
也不止像泉源,
常年送来清凉的慰藉;
也不止像险峰,
增加你的高度,衬托你的威仪.
甚至日光,甚至春雨.
不, 这些都还不够!
我必须是你近旁的一株木棉;
作为树的形象和你站在一起.
… 这才是伟大的爱情,
坚贞就在这里:
爱—
不仅爱你伟岸的身躯,
也爱你坚持的位置, 足下的土地.

If I love you—
I won’t be like the trumpet creeper
Flaunting itself on your tall branches,
If I love you—
I won’t be like the lovesick bird,
Repeating to the green shade its monotonous song;
Nor like a brook,
Bringing cool solace the year round;
Nor like a perilous peak,
Adding to your height, complementing your grandeur;
Nor even sunlight,
Nor even spring rain.
No, these are not enough!
I must be a kapok tree by your side;
Standing by you as a tree. … This is the greatest loveThis is constancy:Love—
I love not just your robust form,
I love the ground you hold, the earth you stand on.

(Original in Shu 1982: 16; translated by Eva Hung in Shu 1994: 24–25)

Shu Ting made her official debut on the renewed Chinese literary scene with this powerful yet gentle poem. She stood out as the only female voice among the Misty Poets, a group who rejected political ideology and the utilitarian view of art in favour of modernist poetic exploration centred on language and the reawakening of subjectivity. In her work, the defining features of this movement acquire a distinctly gendered inflection. To an Oak is one of the earliest and most significant post-Maoist poems to use the lyric form as a creative space in which to articulate marginalised women’s voices. It displays how a new female perspective began to emerge during that period in response to historical realities, which contrasted sharply with the models promoted during the Maoist era.

Material Gender Equality: A Revolutionary Paradox

With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, literature underwent a profound transformation in both language and purpose. Drawing on Mao’s 1942 Yan’an Talks on Literature and Art, it assumed an overtly political function, as writers were expected to renounce personal expression and devote themselves to the national cause. Their mission was to serve the masses—the driving force of the proletarian revolution—by living among them, speaking their language, and writing about their experiences to refine and operationalise their ideas for practical use. Governed by strict ideological and aesthetic norms designed to instil the right political attitudes by creating role models to be emulated (Yeh 1990: 93), literature was integrated into the communist project of negating the self in favour of the collective revolutionary subject.

Poetry did not vanish from the official scene but, imbued with nationalism and realism, idealising war and revolution, it lost much of its experimentation and vitality. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), however, many young people who were displaced from urban areas and ‘sent down’ to the countryside turned to poetry to express their creativity, anxieties, aspirations, and disillusionment (Yeh et al. 2023). It was from this experience that the marginal poetic and publishing scene that became the foundation of the post-1976 literary revival emerged.

As with literature, women’s social roles and representation also changed during the proletarian revolution aimed at building New China. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) promoted policies that dismantled Confucian patriarchal structures and integrated women into the productive system, thereby facilitating their economic independence from men and elevating their social status. This ‘revolutionary sex equality’ (Zhang 2003: 212), in which women were called to ‘hold up half of the sky’ (Finlayson 2018: 39), undoubtedly marked an important step towards emancipation, but it also served socialist materialism by seeking to mobilise women as labour. While advocating for women’s education and participation in building the socialist state, the CCP encouraged a form of gender sameness that ultimately suppressed individuality and assimilated women into the male world through their desexualisation (Hui 2010: 6). In this context, expressing womanhood was deemed bourgeois and anti-revolutionary: ‘love, beauty, emotion, courtship, gender relations, sexuality, and family’ were excluded from public debate (Hui 2010: 6). Women’s imagery, both traditional and Western-inspired, was erased—a process intensified during the Great Leap Forward (1958–61) and the Cultural Revolution, when everyday aspects such as hairstyles and clothing became politically charged and standardised, as epitomised by the figure of the Iron Girl. Strong, muscular, and androgynous women doing hard labour and showing total devotion to national goals became symbols of a material equality based on a paradox: women had to lose their sexual identity to achieve gender equality (Hui 2010: 6).

Searching for Hope: Shu Ting Reclaims Womanhood

Considering these historical dynamics, the significance of To an Oak becomes clearer: Shu Ting portrays an independent woman who reclaims her subjectivity, emphasising her uniqueness. In so doing, she transcends socialist discourse and proposes a deeper form of human equality, which is realised through the recognition of diversity; by asserting herself as a woman, she claims autonomy through dialogue with what is different yet complementary: the man. Shu Ting achieves this by juxtaposing contemporary sensibilities with classical echoes. Thus, although To an Oak is modern in context, it preserves aesthetic qualities reminiscent of traditional genres:

你有你的铜枝铁干,
像刀, 像剑,也像戟;
我有我红硕的花朵,
像沉重的叹息,
又像英勇的火炬.

You have your trunk of steel and iron branches,
Like knives, like swords,
Like spears.
I have my huge red flowers,
Like heavy sighs,
Like valiant torches.

(Original in Shu 1982: 16; translated by Eva Hung in Shu 1994: 25)

The man, associated with strength, vigour, and stability, is represented by ‘steel trunks’, ‘iron branches’, and ‘swords’; the woman, linked to ‘red flowers’, embodies classical elegance and delicacy. However, this is not conservatism: in a period marked by the erasure of gender distinctions and the merging of feminine traits with androgynous propaganda models, the reaffirmation of softness, gentleness, and vulnerability can be seen taking on a new significance. It signals a new consciousness that, seeking alternative expressive strategies, finds meaningful answers in echoes of a long-suppressed tradition. Not by chance, the woman also burns like a ‘valiant torch’—a light that emerges proudly out of the darkness.

Moreover, revaluing these qualities and a classical feminine aesthetic does not prevent Shu Ting from rejecting traditional female social roles. In the poem’s opening lines, for instance, she uses precise imagery, such as the ‘lovesick bird’, ‘sunlight’, and ‘spring rain’—historically linked to the virtuous wife and mother—to assert independence (Geng 2016: 55). Through this dual process of rejection and re-evaluation, Shu Ting constructs a poetic space where tradition intersects with modernity and the longing for love coexists with the pursuit of autonomy. Her articulation of the inner world and her quest for identity engage with the external world, responding to the needs of a new generation and resonating universally with women.

Gender-related themes, however, represent only a minor aspect of Shu Ting’s oeuvre. Her work does not directly align with the feminist discourse that emerged in China in the 1980s and, although she often addresses women’s subjectivity, this is not the focus of her poetics. Motivated by a desire to respond to her generation’s ‘dire need of respect, trust and warmth’, Shu Ting (1995: 85) avoids ideological constraints, using poetry to contemplate the human condition in its widest sense. Indeed, her concern is the recovery of an emotional world—desires, hopes, insecurities, and frailties—that defines humanity before gender. Guided by a quiet yet resilient sensitivity, this outlook infuses her verses with a hopeful strength capable of confronting adversity without succumbing. This quality inspired poet Gu Cheng (1956–93) to dedicate The Return of Hope to her, comparing Shu Ting to a child who, having witnessed the world’s pain, continues to hope and ‘with her love / covers the damp thorns with flowers’ (Shu and Gu 1982: 7; translated by the author).

Yet, the absence of explicit feminist ideology or overt subversion does not prevent her poetry from expressing a distinctly feminine voice or engaging with questions of female identity and gender roles, especially in her early work. In Goddess Peak (神女峰), for instance, Shu Ting draws on tradition by evoking a Warring States (453–221 BCE) legend about the Wu Goddess, who was persecuted for loving another man after swearing eternal devotion to the King of Chu (Zhang 2017: 117). Forced to conceal her emotions, the goddess kept vigil over the king’s tomb and was ultimately transformed into a stone pillar—a lasting emblem of fidelity and chastity. By invoking this figure, Shu Ting questions Confucian morality and the impact of feudal ethics on self-expression, affirming instead the value of a woman who follows her own truth and embraces vulnerability as a form of strength against the rigidity symbolised by stone:

人间天上, 代代相传
但是, 心
真能变成石头吗?… 与其在悬崖上展览千年
不如在爱人肩头痛哭一晚

In heaven, on earth, from generation to generation

Can the heart

Really turn to stone?

… One would rather have a good cry on a lover’s shoulder

Than be displayed on a precipice for a thousand years.

(Original in Shu 1986: 12; translated by Michelle Yeh in Yeh 1992: 186–87)

In To the Legendary Ladies of Hui’an (惠安女子), Shu Ting delves into the emotional lives of women in Hui’an County, Fujian. Daughters, wives, and mothers of fishermen, they are famous for their distinctive attire, which gives them the appearance of an ethnic minority despite their Han Chinese heritage—a feature that has turned them into a tourist attraction. However, beneath this striking visual impression lies a more complex reality: these women endure long periods of solitude, shoulder heavy family responsibilities, and perform arduous labour. Meanwhile, visitors often fixate on their exotic appearance, reducing them to landscapes or legendary figures. Shu Ting subtly critiques this phenomenon, which transforms them into mere magazine images and erases their identities as real people and, above all, as women:

这样优美地站在海天之间
令人忽略了: 你的裸足
所踩过的碱滩和礁石
于是, 在封面和插图中
你成为风景, 成为传奇

Graciously you wait between the sea and the sky
and no-one notices your naked feet
cut by the rock and bitter sands
and this is why, on the covers and inside the magazines
you are merely part of the scenery and myth.

(Original in Shu 1986: 44; translated by Gordon T. Osing and De-an Wu Swihart in Shu 1995: 57)

A Voice in the Night: Zhai Yongming and the Emergence of Women’s Poetic Discourse

During the 1980s, the exploration of subjectivity initiated by Shu Ting was further developed by a group of women poets who infused it with a distinctly gendered dimension. Unlike Shu, they focused more specifically on the emotional and psychological worlds of the female self, often engaging with unconventional subjects and striking imagery (Zhang 2002: 108).

The leading figure of this movement was Zhai Yongming (b. 1955), whose 1984 poem Woman (女人) inaugurated a new collective discourse that found its critical definition under the term ‘Women’s Poetry’ (女性诗歌), introduced by the critic Tang Xiaodu in 1987. This definition is based on the idea that simply being a woman does not qualify one’s work as ‘women’s poetry’. Instead, it refers to works that adopt a female-centred perspective, embody a feminist and subversive consciousness, and reject stereotypical gender roles and traditional notions of femininity. In such poetry, aesthetic existence and concrete existence almost completely overlap, revealing a world long obscured by male prejudice and opening it to reinterpretation (Tang 1987: 58). Tang’s rather restrictive yet canonical definition, which clearly excluded poets such as Shu Ting, nevertheless gave rise to an important academic debate aimed at understanding and reinterpreting this emerging phenomenon.

Subsequently, other scholars proposed broader and more inclusive approaches—most notably, Lü Jin. Starting from the idea that all women’s poetry intends to ‘create the gender of the subject’, Lü (1999: 140) grouped numerous authors from different generations, regions, and poetic movements under the label of ‘Women’s Poetry’—a category defined solely by gender. However, he distinguished between ‘feminist poetry’ (女性主义诗歌), which corresponds to Tang’s definition, and ‘female poetry’ (女子诗歌), of which Shu Ting is regarded one of the leading figures. In the latter category, women’s awakening is part of a wider social awakening, as poets engage more actively with others and the outside world. Anchored in a female perspective, their vision extends beyond gender-specific themes to encompass wider social concerns (Lü 1999).

Women’s poetry, in Tang’s definition, emerged in response to both the Maoist erasure of female subjectivity and enduring traditional norms, and it was linked to the broader cultural fever of the 1980s. The introduction of Western feminism—initially through translations of works such as Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and Mary Eagleton’s Feminist Literary Theory—provided new conceptual tools. Although many poets—Zhai foremost among them—did not identify as feminist, this perspective nonetheless disrupted the traditional symbiosis between men’s and women’s literature and became a crucial reference for developing a distinctive women’s poetics (Yan 1998: 69). Equally significant was the influence of American confessional poetry, which enabled emotions—frustration, anguish, fear, and guilt—to be publicly voiced and transformed into a collective experience (Zhang and Chen 2016: 154). Sylvia Plath became a model for writing that foregrounds women’s lived realities. Her translations, circulated in unofficial journals, encouraged Chinese women poets to embrace personal expression and subversive imagery to break with monolithic ideology and achieve an integrated, independent self (Zhang 2002: 111).

Within this context, Zhai’s Woman—originally a cycle of 20 poems—draws on the confessional mode to explore women’s innermost world and illuminate what the poet seems to conceive of as a form of darkest consciousness. In its opening section, ‘Premonition’ (预感), Zhai introduces a woman in black—a figure evoking Plath’s influence (Xu 2015: 33) and signalling the emergence of a new female subject, opening a space in which femininity can be reimagined and explored:

穿很裙子的女人夤夜而来
她秘密的一瞥便我精疲力竭
我 突然 想起 这 个 季节 鱼 都 会 死去
而 每 条 路 正在 穿越 飞 乌 的 痕迹貌似尸体的山峦被黑暗拖曳
附近 灌木 的 心跳 隐约 可 闻
那些 巨大 的 乌 从 空中 向 我 俯视
带 着 人 类 的 眼神
在 一 种 秘 而 不 宣 的 野蛮 空气
冬天 起 伏 着 残酷 的 雄性 意识我 一 向 有 着 不 同 寻常 的 平静
犹如 言 者, 因 此 我 在 白天 看 见 黑夜.

A woman dressed in black arrives in the dead of night
Just one secretive glance leaves me spent
I realize with a start: this is the season when all fish die
And every road is criss-crossed with traces of birds in flight A corpse-like chain of mountain ranges dragged off by the darkness
The heartbeats of nearby thickets barely audible
Enormous birds gaze down at me from the sky
With human eyes
In a barbarous air that guards its secrets
Winter lets its brutally male consciousness rise and fall I’ve always been uncommonly sereneLike the blind, I see night’s darkness in the light of day.

(Original in Zhai 1997: 3–4; translated by Andrea Lingenfelter in Zhai 2011: 2–3)

This first section of Woman is deliberate, anticipating what Zhai (1985) describes as a ‘destructive premonition’, an impulse driving her to probe deeply into her own psyche. From the opening lines, we are drawn into a dark world articulated through language that contrasts sharply with Shu Ting’s imagery. While reflecting Sylvia Plath’s influence, the motif of night also resonates with Chinese tradition, in which it is associated with yin (阴), the cosmic feminine principle opposing masculine yang (阳), and ties to symbolic dichotomies such as night/day, moon/sun, darkness/light, cold/heat, and destruction/creation (Zhang 2005: 94).

In Woman, darkness is filled with recurring images—birds, spiders, crows, black cats, bats, dreams, poppies, and the moon (Zhang 2002: 112)—creating an atmosphere of mystery and unease while signalling the core of Zhai’s vision: women’s lived experiences and destinies (Zhu 2022: 41). It becomes an allegorical space of oppression and awakening, vividly captured in the ‘corpse-like chain of mountain ranges dragged off by the darkness’, set against a ‘barbarous air’ where ‘male consciousness rises and falls’. Light—long symbolising masculine power—is questioned and shown to fade away. Zhai’s image of seeing ‘the night’s darkness in the light of day’ encapsulates this inversion and seems to recall Gu Cheng’s famous lines: ‘黑夜给了我黑色的眼睛 [The dark night has given me dark eyes] / 我却用它寻找光明 [Yet I use them to search for light’] (2009: 31; translated by Seán Golden and Chu Chiyu in Gu 1990: 1). Gu’s words are often seen as a powerful expression of the Cultural Revolution generation, portraying its journey from darkness towards the light of a new future. In contrast, Zhai is uncommonly serene and actively engages with the night, reconfiguring its imagery as a space for the emergence of a new female perspective.

This vision culminates in Zhai’s concept of Night Consciousness (黑夜意识), denoting an awareness rooted in women’s physical and psychic traits—one that enables an autonomous, gendered existence and the imagining of an alternative world in which female subjectivity is fully expressed:

An inner, individual, and universal awareness—which I call the ‘consciousness of the night’—made me the one who takes on the thoughts, opinions, and feelings of women, guiding me to embrace this mission with full awareness. This is poetry … This is the first dark night and, when this night falls, it leads us into a wholly new world made of particular positions and perspectives that belong solely to women. (Zhai 1986: 124; translation by the author)

The appearance of Woman and the simultaneous elaboration of the concept of ‘Night Consciousness’ undoubtedly marked a major innovation in the poetic language of the time and, more specifically, in women’s poetic expression. For critics such as Zhou Zhan (2007), these works signify the recovery of female self-subjectivity, the awakening of individual free will, and the conscious and genuine rebirth of gender awareness.

This awakening sometimes manifests as scepticism, as is evident in the opening lines of ‘Conjecture’ (臆想)—the section of Woman following ‘Premonition’—in which the poet questions the certainty of objects around her, such as the sun, the sky, the moon, and the ‘oak tree’. The last is a clear reference to Shu Ting’s poem and to the idea of masculinity embodied by the tree within it.

太阳, 我在怀疑, 黑色风景与天鹅
被泡沫溢满的躯体半开半闭
一个斜视之眼的注目便空气
变得晦涩, 如此而已梦在何处繁殖? 出现灵魂预言者
首先, 我是否正在消失? 橡树是什么?

The sun, I am suspecting, black scenery and swans.

The foaming body is half open, half closed.

A sidelong glance makes the air obscure—

that is it.

 

Where does the dream breed? The soul prophet appears.

First of all, am I disappearing? What is the oak tree?

(Original in Zhai 2011: 2; translated by Xu Xin in Xu 2015: 43)

This dynamic, coupled with the scepticism noted above, is evident in Jing’an Village (静安庄, 1985), set in the village to which Zhai was sent during the Cultural Revolution. The poem critically reflects on life through women’s experiences shaped by historical and social constraints. Here, the day is uncertain and suspicious, while the moon—symbolising feminine consciousness—illuminates long-hidden suffering:

这是一个充满怀疑的日子, 她来到此地
月亮露出凶光, 繁殖令人心碎的秘密

This is a day full of suspicion, when she arrived at this place

And the moon reveals its savage light, seeding heartrending secrets.

(Original in Zhai 1997: 35; translation by the author)

Thus, the night does not simply obscure; rather, in a sense, it ‘reveals’ what remains unspoken. Within this dimension, Zhai explores other key elements that contribute to what has often been described as a subversive poetics: the writing of the body and an engagement with death—motifs recurring throughout her work and in contemporary women’s poetry, embodying both personal and collective female experience.

The body poetics in Zhai’s works resonates with Hélène Cixous’ (1976) notion of the body as a site of women’s writing and as a nexus between textuality and sexuality. In this sense, the body becomes the essence of gendered experience and a gateway to a distinctly feminine vision of the world—an inexhaustible source of inspiration whose representation is crucial. It assumes multiple meanings: from a space of reception that endures the suffering of the external world to an active, resistant subject and, at times, a dimension revealing hidden conflicts.

The body’s representation also celebrates difference, often through texts that challenge taboos of nudity and sexuality or affirm female creativity via metaphors of birth and blood. Blood becomes a defining mark of female sexuality, linked to menstruation, loss of virginity, or abortion. In ‘End’ (结束), the last section of Woman, blood is associated with the tree and the heart—symbols of life and creative force. Just as a tree draws water and nourishment from the heart, the poet invokes her body and blood circulation to spark her creative imagination:

最初的中兴点,像一株树
血从地下涌来便我升高
现在我睁开崭新的眼睛
并对天长叹: 完成之后又怎么?

To the original center like a tree
Blood gushes out of the earth, raising me high
Now I open my brand new eyes
And skyward, have a sigh: what then after it is done?

(Original in Zhai 1997: 27; translation by Jeanne H. Zhang in Zhang 2004: 95)

Finally, closely linked to her focus on the body, Zhai also engages with the symbolic meaning of death. By connecting mortality to the female body, she challenges traditional value hierarchies and integrates death into gender identity, presenting it as not merely an end, but also a poetic space where life, suffering, and creativity intersect. Influenced by Plath—who saw death as a personal possession allowing control over life and death—Zhang (2002: 111) sees mortality as a path towards an integrated, independent self. This reflection acquires an existential dimension in a 1988 poem titled Death’s Design (死亡安图), in which, by making a mother’s death and a daughter’s childbirth converge and coexist, Zhai interweaves these figures to represent the two dimensions of a natural cycle, while exploring themes of love, growth, destiny, and mortality:

在生与死的脐带上受难
孪生两种命运—
过去和未来

Suffering at the navel string of life and death
Giving birth to twinned destinies—
Past and future.

(Original in Zhai 1997: 64; translation by Jeanne H. Zhang in Zhang 2004: 155)

Creativity in Marginality

Shu Ting and Zhai Yongming embody two of the most significant poetic articulations of femininity in the early post-Mao era. Their works illuminate the intertwined processes of poetic renewal and the awakening of female consciousness that shaped the cultural transformations of the late 1970s and 1980s.

Emerging from the margins and underground circles, poetry became both a space of literary experimentation and a privileged means for women to voice subjectivities after Maoism’s collapse. Through poetry, they questioned their historical and social conditions and explored new ways of being women in a rapidly changing world. Shu Ting, with her return to hope, inaugurates a feminine voice that seeks answers in dialogue with tradition. She explores subjectivity not as isolation but as a relationship with Otherness—particularly with men, but also with the external world and the collective of her generation—thus cultivating a poetic voice that contributes to broader reflections on the human condition.

The sense of historical mission and social responsibility in her work, along with its luminous optimism, finds a counterpoint in Zhai Yongming, whose poetry, marked by nocturnal imagery and an introspective awareness of women’s realities, pushes inquiry towards a deeper understanding of self and gender. Through her ‘black night’, ‘body poetics’, and subversive dimensions, Zhai transforms female experience into a space of questioning and resistance, making poetry a discourse of womanhood. These contrasting approaches, emerging within a few years of each other, provide a privileged perspective on the multiple ways new female poetic subjectivities take shape, forming distinct yet complementary threads in the complex mosaic of contemporary China—a society undergoing rapid cultural, economic, and social transformation.

At the same time, this development aligns with critical reflections on the relationship between gender and genre, highlighting the subversive power of women’s writing and its capacity to transform traditional forms. In the Chinese context, the deliberate choice by many women to express themselves through poetry—a genre traditionally regarded as elitist and historically dominated by men—further reinforces the effort to challenge and deconstruct prevailing symbolic and cultural orders. In this sense, marginality—a condition that, as seen in twentieth-century China, has linked poetry and female subjectivity—appears no longer as mere exclusion, but as a productive space capable of generating resistance and new possibilities for defining identity.

Featured Image: Flowering branch of a kapok tree, by xiaoliangge (Adobe Stock Standard License).

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