Representation of Chinese Women by Chinese Australian Male Writers

This chapter investigates the representation of Chinese women by Chinese Australian male writers, situating literary portrayals of femininity within broader debates about masculinity, nationalism, feminism, and postcolonial identity. Beginning with the gender controversies that have shaped Asian diasporic literary discourse—most notably the masculinist critique of writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan—the chapter traces how anxieties about race and emasculation intersect with patriarchal ideology in diasporic contexts. It argues that representations of women by male writers cannot be separated from shifting constructions of masculinity, whether rooted in Confucian hierarchies, modern Chinese nationalist discourse, or Western hegemonic masculinity. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from gender studies, including Confucian gender ideology, feminist intervention, and Raewyn Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity, this chapter examines how diasporic displacement complicates traditional gender relations. Close readings of Ouyang Yu’s The Eastern Slope Chronicle and Brian Castro’s The Garden Book reveal divergent male authorial positions. In Ouyang’s work, female characters are frequently framed through a destabilised migrant masculinity that projects frustration and emasculation onto women, often reproducing misogynistic and phallocentric structures. In contrast, Castro’s novel destabilises such masculinist authority by foregrounding female voice, spectral memory, and racialised embodiment, thereby interrogating Orientalist and patriarchal constructions of Chinese femininity. By analysing how Chinese Australian male writers construct women as sexualised objects, ideological threats, melancholic muses, or resistant subjects, this chapter demonstrates that gender representation in diasporic literature is a site of contested power. It contends that literary portrayals of Chinese women reflect not only gendered hierarchies but also the fraught negotiations of race, nation, and belonging in multicultural Australia. Ultimately, the chapter reveals how masculinity and femininity are mutually constitutive categories whose meanings shift across historical, cultural, and transnational contexts.