When a Woman Looks at a Woman: Poetics of the Look in Zhai Yongming's Ekphrastic Writings

Abstract:This essay explores how the rhetorical device of ekphrasis is used in a series of essays and poems by Zhai Yongming. Taking as its starting point the ekphrastic essay "A Mexican Woman," this paper suggests that, through ekphrasis, Zhai's narrative voice creates intimate female bonds between the narrator and the subject of her narration. By doing so, Zhai's implied narrator explores new ways of seeing other women that rely on intimate recognition and that offer an alternative to a male gaze that denies women an active role in the dominant regimes of visuality.