ABSTRACT
Dressed in fashionable attire the female writer as bad girl is back in town. She made a splashy sensation in the headlines, is on the tip of all gossiping tongues, and meets the wrath of bureaucrats who criticize her unrestrained decadence. A different kind of cultural revolution hit the China scene in the 1990s, in smoky bars, on neon-lit streets, and on the net. What seems to be now at stake is not the liberation of the people but of the individuals and their right to consume. Concurrently, we are witnessing the revived struggle for recognition of the woman author in the midst of a mediatized and commercialized consumption of the female. As China traverses the endless road to modernity, the wayward ways of unruly women, especially those who write, are held in check. Although this phenomenon is nothing new and takes its cue from the unfinished project of early twentieth-century China to liberate the woman writer, it presents today’s Chinese women with a predicament peculiar to feminism and women’s liberation.
