ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses critically the trajectory of the development of the Chinese bot poet Xiao Bing, focusing on the most recent of her three poetry collections published thus far: Alternative Worlds (2020). Unlike the former two books, which build the conventionalized romantic-sentimental notions of poetry and poethood, Alternative Words tries to appeal to intellectualized postmodern sensibilities by framing Xiao Bing's poems and paintings into a herstorical narrative: recuperating the voices of forgotten women presented as different embodiments of Xiao Bing. The way it does so, however, not only fails to do justice to the women in question, but also unwittingly caricaturizes and, indeed, undermines many central postulates of contemporary feminism.
