Cold War Femininities in China and America: National Ideals and Uncontainable Performances in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Yang Lüfang's Cuckoo Sings Again

• Published in: Comparative drama 2021-12, Vol.55 (4), p.464-489
• Main Author: Ranran, Zhang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: American literature; China; Cold War; Communism; Comparative analysis; Consumption; Drama; Employment; Femininity; Happiness; Ideology; Middle class; Socialism; Socialists; Theater; War; Williams, Tennessee; Williams, Tennessee (Thomas Lanier Williams) (1911-1983); Women; Women in war; Working class
• ISSN: 0010-4078; 1936-1637; 1936-1637
• DOI: 10.1353/cdr.2021.0034

Scholars studying the construction of Cold War femininities have tended to focus on how these polarized femininities were propagated by the United States and the Soviet Union as ammunition for national contestation.1 However, the casting of Cold War femininity solely in terms of United States-capitalist women and Soviet Unioncommunist women overlooks the complex connections between women in different nations in favor of emphasizing the polarization between competing ideologies or affirming the homogeneity within each ideology. [...]women's contribution to socialist construction through hard work and frugality were highlighted as essential to Chinese femininity, while American women's consumption and leisure were propagandized as selfish, degenerate, and anti-socialist behaviors. An analysis of these three foci reveals how womens desires and ambitions in Cold War China and America often overlapped and aligned, even as their differences were starkly drawn and upheld by national fantasies of femininity. After years of instability beginning with the 1930s economic crisis, through the 1940s warfare, and culminating with the subsequent Cold War confrontation, "young postwar Americans," as Elaine Tyler May suggests, were "homeward bound," seeking "security," "abundance," and "fulfillment" that "self-contained home held out to promise.