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Women's tanci, or "plucking rhymes," are chantefable narratives written by upper-class educated women from seventeenth-century to early twentieth-century China. Writing Gender in Early Modern Chinese Women's Tanci Fiction offers a timely study on early modern Chinese women's representations of gender, nation, and political activism in their tanci works before and after the Taiping Rebellion (1850 to 1864), as well as their depictions of warfare and social unrest. Women tanci authors' redefinition of female exemplarity within the Confucian orthodox discourses of virtue, talent, chastity, and political integrity could be bourgeoning expressions of female exceptionalism and could have foreshadowed protofeminist ideals of heroism. They establish a realistic tenor in affirming feminine domestic authority, and open up spaces for discussions of "womanly becoming," female exceptionalism, and shifting family power structures.The vernacular mode underlying these texts yields productive possibilities of gendered self-representations, bodily valences, and dynamic performances of sexual roles. The result is a vernacular discursive frame that enables women's appropriation and refashioning of orthodox moral values as means of self-affirmation and self-realization. Validations of women's political activism and loyalism to the nation attest to tanci as a premium vehicle for disseminating progressive social incentives to popular audiences. Women's tanci marks early modern writers' endeavors to carve out a space of feminine becoming, a discursive arena of feminine appropriation, reinvention, and boundary-crossings. In this light, women's tanci portrays gendered mobility through depictions of a heroine's voyages or social ascent, and entails a forward-moving historical progression toward a more autonomous and vested model of feminine subjectivity.

In Women's Tanci Fiction in Late Imperial and Early Modern China, Li Guo presents the first book-length study in English of women's tanci fiction, the distinctive Chinese form of narrative written in rhymed lines during the late imperial to early modern period (related to, but different from, the orally performed version also called tanci) She explores the tradition through a comparative analysis of five seminal texts. Guo argues that Chinese women writers of the period position the personal within the diegesis in order to reconfigure their moral commitments and personal desires. By fashioning a "feminine" representation of subjectivity, tanci writers found a habitable space of self-expression in the male-dominated literary tradition.Through her discussion of the emergence, evolution, and impact of women's tanci, Guo shows how historical forces acting on the formation of the genre serve as the background for an investigation of cross-dressing, self-portraiture, and authorial self-representation. Further, Guo approaches anew the concept of "woman-oriented perspective" and argues that this perspective conceptualizes a narrative framework in which the heroine(s) are endowed with mobility to exercise their talent and power as social beings as men's equals. Such a woman-oriented perspective redefines normalized gender roles with an eye to exposing women's potentialities to transform historical and social customs in order to engender a world with better prospects for women.

Before making her Oscar-winning documentary on AIDS orphans in rural China, The Blood of Yingzhou District (2007), Yang Ziye edited Hollywood films such as Joan Chen's Autumn in New York and Wayne Wong's Joy Luck Club. Regarding the differences between film editing and the making of documentary as "taking an accidental shot of real life," she observes: "Editing feature films is much easier. The emphasis is on the craft and you just need to bring out what the director envisions; but in documentary, you don't have any control of your subjects. You just let the story unfold on its own." This essay investigates how The Blood of Yingzhou District reconstructs China's AIDS discourse and the processes in which such discourse regulates social practices. As one critic comments: "Shot with small-format cameras entirely by Chinese film crews, The Blood of Yingzhou District achieves a level of intimacy and candor rarely seen in documentary work from China" (see Cinema Guild). Yang maneuvered the filming process carefeully to avoid the risk of governmental interference, since the film's subject is about rural children affected by AIDS. In an earlier documentary, Julia's Story, Yang had interviewed a young university student who confessed that she had contracted the HIV virus through sexual contact with her American boyfriend. In both of Yang's films, audiences perceive a thoughtful negotation of what, in documentary ethics, is often termed a "three-way relationship" between the filmmaker, the filmed subjects or social actors, and their viewers (Nichols 59).

In her article "Women's Wartime Life Writing in Early Twentieth-Century China" Li Guo discusses military diaries, prison memoirs, and autobiographical reportages. These documents offer rich insights into the political endeavors and military mobility of women. Guo analyzes Bingying Xie's 1928 war diary about the Chinese nationalists' northern expedition, Langi Hu's 1937 book about anti-Japanese activism, and Lang Bai's 1939 reportage about the Sino-Japanese War and argues that these texts allow women to reconfigure the discourse of nation through experimental life writing in order to develop the genre with tales of valor, hope, struggle, and heroism. Guo argues that contrary to the perception that early twentieth-century Chinese women's military activism was facilitated through assimilation into male identities, Xie's, Hu's, and Bai's texts show that women celebrated their womanhood through mass mobilization and dedicated services at the front as soldiers, activists, and reporters.

In her article "Rethinking Theatrical Images of the New Woman in China's Republican Era" Li Guo analyses the multivalent representations of the New Woman and posits that they encompass a broad array of blended feminine identities following the introduction of Western literary and cultural trends into Chinese culture. The tensions between ideological discourses about nation, gender, and politics as revealed in the plays of the republican period reveal the many underlying cultural paradigms and the processes in which dramatists Sinicized foreign models of the New Woman to appeal to their domestic audiences. Guo explores how the playwrights' gendered viewpoints contribute to divergent representation of the New Woman as a feminine subject and reconfigure Western theatrical traditions to express new ideals of women's sexual, social, and political identities.

This essay will explore the narrative mode of feminine melodrama in Love in a Fallen City, a novella by the Shanghainese writer Eileen Chang (1920–1995). Chang has gained international fame for her depiction of Chinese women in the tumultuous transitional period prior to the modern era, especially traditional women figures that are in stark contrast with the New Woman ideal portrayed by her contemporary writers. Born in Shanghai, Chang was a descendant of an eminent late imperial official and received western education in Hong Kong under the influence of her open-minded mother. A literary sensation at the age of twenty-five, Chang was applauded by audiences for depicting characters with an illustrative psychological depth, especially elite women or women of low social origins who strive to carve out their precarious spaces via their ventures in the marriage market. Unlike the revolutionary women depicted in many novels of the time, Chang's traditional Chinese women characters cannot do away with cultural capital and even aesthetic capital. Instead, they rely on the alliance of beauty and culture to achieve a matrimonial bond and the social recognition that comes with the marriage contract. Chang's heroine is often such an "old-fashioned" gentry woman, who, in the historical swirl of decorum, romance, and commodity fetishism, explores a feminine consciousness overlooked by those May Fourth authors whose works were baptized with revolutionist politics.

This essay studies a tanci work, A Histoire of Heroic Women and Men (1905), as a case which reflects the intersecting themes of crossdressing, gender representation and the literary form of tanci. Written tanci, appropriated and redeveloped by educated women to tell stories of female crossdressers, scholars, and military leaders, offers a meaningful intervention in the dominant social and cultural discourses of womanhood in late imperial China. In the fictional realm, women's acts of crossdressing transcend the Confucian ideological prescriptions of feminine identity, displaying their heroic efforts to pursue autonomy in a patriarchal culture. This essay will analyze how these examples of crossdressing interact with and modify current critical accounts of gender and sexuality. A Histoire, in particular, holds a place of prominence in late imperial Chinese literature because of its revelation of the troubled relationship between gender construction, narrative agency, and women's identity. The text manifestly destabilizes conventional attitudes toward gendered identity, yet simultaneously exposes the social and practical challenges of such temporary and often imagined transgressions, which are exercised by incarcerating the feminine and borrowing the male subjective position through transvestite performance.