This paper looks into the ways women were represented with reference to the Ding Ling’s writings from the wartime 1940s to the 1970s when the Cultural Revolution had just ended, and identifies the relation between the different mainstream discourses in the 40s, 50s and 70s and the representation of women’s image.
〈When I was in Sha Chun(Cloud Village)〉, a story about a Chinese ‘comfort woman’ during the China-Japan War, is a piece that revealed the Chinese Communist Party had mobilized prostitutes as soldiers during the War, accusing the institutionalized use of sex and the moral stigmatizing. This piece has also related closely to the Japanese feminists’ studies in regard to nationalism and sex. The 50s’ 〈Deep inside the Alley〉is about a women who was turned from a sex slave to a worker. She had to pass through countless toils which were originated from the ways the society has looked at those prostitutes mobilized as military comfort women by the Communist Party in the 1950s. The Party’s Abolition of Licensed Prostitution Policy regarded the problem of prostitution not as that of ‘sexual consciousness of a wide range of men who purchase sex’, but as that of ’bourgeoisie which is the enemy of the class’, leaving the patriarchic traditions that divides women’s sex into ‘purity’ and ‘immorality’ not at all challenged. 〈Du Wanxiang〉, written during the Cultural Revolution, portrays an effort for transforming a relationship of ‘a wife’ or ‘a full-time wife’ into that of a ‘comradery’. Through this piece, Ding Ling represented the duty of a ‘wife’ as fully achievable when the woman becomes armored with socialist morality, not when she becomes an object with ‘sexual attraction’ from the heterosexual viewpoint. These three types of representations of women each had backdrops of ‘Nation Safeguarding’, ‘Nation Building’, and ‘the Cultural Revolution’, the last two of which belonged to the establishing process of an ideal woman in a socialist society. During the Cultural Revolution, the already non-existent bourgeoisie was transposed into the problem of ‘immoral thought’ and that bourgeoisie, reborn, became identified with again the sexual perversion. This kind of discourse formation during the Cultural Revolution could be regarded as an idiomatic sex discourse of Chinese socialism, differing from German socilaism in which sexual deviance was criticized as ‘a deviance from femininity and masculinity’, indispensable for house keeping. The meaning of Du Wanxiang lies in the way it redefines the duty of wife in other perspective than heterosexual one, whereas the male workers were never needed to concern themselves about the matter, even though both sexes were ‘subjected’ to collectivism.