The exceptionally powerful Chinese women leaders of the late seventh and early eighth centuries—including Wu Zhao, the Taiping and Anle princesses, Empress Wei, and Shangguan Wan’er—though quite prominent in the Chinese cultural tradition, remain elusive and often misunderstood or essentialized throughout history. Transgressive Typologies utilizes a new, multidisciplinary approach to understand how these figures’ historical identities are constructed in the mainstream secular literary-historical tradition and to analyze the points of view that inform these constructions. Using close readings and rereadings of primary texts written in medieval China through later imperial times, this study elucidates narrative typologies and motifs associated with these women to explore how their power is rhetorically framed, gendered, and ultimately deemed transgressive. Rebecca Doran offers a new understanding of major female figures of the Tang era within their literary-historical contexts, and delves into critical questions about the relationship between Chinese historiography, reception history, and the process of image-making and cultural construction.
Rebecca Doran is Assistant Professor of Chinese and Director of Chinese Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami. Her research and teaching interests include Chinese literature, historiography, and Chinese language. More specifically, her work examines Tang and Song literature and cultural history, with particular interests in women’s literature, gender studies, and material culture.
