Intervention : Coraline Jortay

How can we re-envision the construction of a national language from below, taking into account the diversity of voices involved in these reforms? Starting from the visit of a delegation of feminist teachers from Tianjin to the annual congress of the National Association for the Advancement of Education in Nanjing in July 1924, this talk retraces how feminist activists influenced debates on the unification of language in China from the late Qing into the early PRC period. As feminist critics took on patronymics, pronouns, orthographic reforms, and popular literacy, this talk asks: how did gender and language politics come to intersect in Republican China? How did these debates evolve across decades? And how can they help us in turn re-envision debates of our time beyond Eurocentric understandings of language and gender norms?

Thematic axes : Politiques des arts et des littératures

Keywords : Gender studies, Sinophone Studies

Updated on 08/04/2026