UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation investigates works of Li Xiaojiang (1951-2025), a foundational figure in the development of women’s studies in post-socialist China who received comparatively little attention in international scholarship. Li has been criticized for essentialist understanding of sex and gender and for advocating women’s self-improvement in ways that appeared complicit with China’s state-led modernization and emerging market economy. Without dismissing these criticism, this dissertation argues that they capture only part of Li’s theoretical and political significance. Reading her work across four decades, I recover a sustained concern with a fundamental political question: how might women cultivate subjective capacity and political agency under conditions that seem to leave little for either? The dissertation traces Li thought roughly chronologically. I first examine her writings of the 1980s for which she received the most criticism for. Drawing on the body of texts that her critics did not pay much attention to, I argue that despite her explicit language of gender essentialism, her account of subjectivation as synthesis of the Self and the society contains the conceptual resource for a theory of transformative agency embedded in social construction. I then turn to the 1990s debates over women’s return to the home, showing how Li distinguished herself from many of her contemporary feminist scholars by shifting attention from constatations over formal rights to the preservation of a public space in which women could continue to participate in public discussions and thus cultivate their subjective capacities. Finally, I examine her later writings and argue that even her retreat from conventional politics and turn towards the pursuit of Truth constituted an attempt to preserve spaces for intellectual and political freedom under increasingly restrictive conditions. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading, this dissertation argues that critical scholarship can attend simultaneously to the limitations of a thinker and to the possibilities contained within her thought. Li’s work, I argue, offers not a finished theory but a sustained effort of locate political agency where politics appears impossible, and to preserve the possibility of freedom and hope under conditions that offer little reason for either.