Femininity in Zhai Yongming's "Lightly Injured People, Gravely Wounded City"

Abstract:Contemporary poetry critics have hastily accepted Zhai Yongming's negative attitude towards femininity in her essay "Night Consciousness" to build a feminist poetics against the so-called feminine tradition of Chinese women's poetry. However, Zhai confessed later that in order to shed the sentimental elements of femininity, she ended up perpetuating the feminine trait. This essay offers a careful reevaluation of the notion of femininity in Zhai's poetry and prose. Revealing Zhai's endeavor to rewrite the past and ponder the present from a "feminine" perspective in her poem "Lightly Injured People, Gravely Wounded City," this paper argues that Zhai's paradoxical intervention speaks not of her rejection of the so-called feminine tradition but her resistance to oppression.