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Part of
Language, Culture and Identity – Signs of Life
Edited by Vera da Silva Sinha, Ana Moreno-Núñez and Zhen Tian
[Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts 13] 2020
► pp. 275–293

Chapter 13
“Keeping up with the times”

Nüxing, funü and the affective value of the formulated text

| University of Arizona

Formulations (Schoenhals 1992; Hershatter 1997) are fixed ways of distributing political norms in Chinese politics. This paper reads re-formulations on the two pivotal categories of women – nüxing (woman-sex) in the republican era and funü (wife-woman) in the revolutionary era – and the propaganda of “keeping up with the times” (“与时俱进”) in the post-Mao People’s Daily. It argues that these categories’ embodied historical affects produce new affective values in the post-Mao public discourse, thus attaching women to the nation in specific ways; these values are used by the state to mediate the tensions between different female social groups in China’s rapidly-changing society and its self-positioning in the global context.

Keywords: formulation, time, categories of women, affect, the People’s Daily
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Categories of women and the affective value of formulated texts
    • Formulation: Doing things with words in Chinese politics
    • Nüxing and Funü: Women, nation and the affective value of text
  • Reading formulations in People’s Daily : Funü, Nüxing and “Keeping up with the Times”
    • Formulating “Keeping up with the Times”: The times as affective object
    • Women and the spirit of the times
  • Women and education/ “Jiaoyu”
    • The problem of funü’s education, nüxing’s education and nüxing jiaoyu
    • Nüxing jiaoyu in the market economy
    • Nüxing jiaoyu as a historical discourse
    • Why not funü jiaoyu?
  • Funü, nüxing and the suzhi discourse
    • What is quality (“suzhi”)?
    • Suzhi, funü and new nüxing
  • Conclusion: Time, women and the affective value of the formulated text
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clscc.13.13ma
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