ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what type of works The Second Sex (TSS) and The Vagina Monologues (TVM) are, what they are about, and what responses they have received. It also explores when and why they are translated, on which English version each translation is based, who the translators are, and what the Chinese translations look like. All these help explain why the Chinese translators deal with the materials on the female body and female sexuality in certain ways and why censorship operates in different degrees in different translations. A twentieth-century classic and a pivotal analysis of women's oppression by men, TSS is a complex work of theoretical philosophy, as well as a brilliant and persuasive polemical work. TSS informally arrived in China in the late 1970s, shortly after the Cultural Revolution, when a Taiwan translation of Book II was circulating privately among Mainland readers. TVM is a bold feminist dramatic work produced by Eve Ensler, a radical feminist and a playwright.
