Sex and Power: Gender Constructions in Chinese Australian Writing

Chapter 2 , “Sex and Power,” examines how sexuality functions as a central arena for negotiating gender, race, and authority in Chinese Australian writing. Framed by the insight that sexuality is never separate from power, the chapter draws on Michel Foucault’s theorisation of discourse and biopolitics, as well as postcolonial feminist concepts such as “double colonisation” and the “coloniality of gender,” to argue that representations of female desire are inseparable from the historical legacies of patriarchy, colonialism, and racialisation. In diasporic contexts, Chinese women confront intersecting structures of domination that simultaneously eroticise, discipline, and commodify their bodies. Through close readings of Lillian Ng’s Silver Sister and Swallowing Clouds, the chapter explores contrasting modes of sexual agency. Silver Sister’s vow of celibacy reconfigures sexuality as refusal and economic autonomy, while Syn’s journey in Swallowing Clouds traces a transformation from sexual object to self-conscious agent who appropriates the femme fatale myth to contest patriarchal control. The analysis then turns to the controversial genre of “body writing,” comparing Shi Guoying’s “Mistaken Love” and Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby. These texts foreground female sexual expression as both emancipatory gesture and commodified spectacle, revealing the ambivalence of post-feminist modernity in a global consumer culture. Finally, Michele Lee’s memoir Banana Girl re-situates sexuality within second-generation diasporic identity, where racialised stereotypes, family expectations, and Western feminist discourses intersect. Across these varied narratives, the chapter contends that sexual agency becomes a key measure of autonomy in diasporic life. Yet this agency remains paradoxical: it disrupts oppressive hierarchies even as it risks reinscribing them within market logics and exoticist frames. By placing sexuality at the centre of literary analysis, this chapter demonstrates that the intimate sphere of the body is a critical site where power is contested and subjectivity reimagined. In Chinese Australian writing, sex is not merely a private act, but a profoundly political language through which women negotiate visibility, desire, and self-definition.