Chengshi Manyouzhe 城市漫游者: poetic practices of an all-female poetry collective in 21st Century China

Despite major transformations in Chinese society that have seemingly marginalised the poetic genre, poetry remains a core element of people’s lives. In this context, it is worth exploring contemporary women’s poetry (nüxing shige 女性诗歌) from the late 1980s and the tradition it initiated. Drawing on earlier studies on the topic, this research examines an all-female poetry collective founded in Shanghai in 2016, Chengshi manyouzhe 城市漫游者 (The Flâneuses), whose seven post-90s members represent a unique configuration within Chinese poetry in the 21st century. The group’s poetic practices seem to embody recent developments in women’s poetry, in relation to a genealogy originating in the 20th century. As emerging authors, they reveal new strategies to carve out space in terms of practical, formal, and thematic aspects, which shed light on today’s poetry scene and younger generations. Chapter 1 outlines the historical trajectory of women’s poetry, introducing the collective’s members while examining relevant similarities, modes of poetry creation and dissemination. Through the lenses of gender studies, this chapter explores the strategies through which women poets in China have engaged in the re-creation and elaboration of a “language of one’s own” after a long imposed silence. Significantly, the group also employs social media for literary and identity-building purposes while maintaining traditional print publication, within both the “official” and “unofficial” spheres. This brief journey in the history of contemporary women’s poetry aims at disclosing the main poetic trajectories elaborated by women poets in China in order to (re)discover and define their artistic and existential identities vis à vis a long established patriarchal tradition. Chapter 2 explores how they turn Baudelaire’s flâneur into the flâneuse, re-writing this originally male character and establishing their own relationship with the contemporary metropolis one step and one verse at a time. In fact, the practice of flânerie characterises their modi poetandi, particularly on the popular Chinese social media, WeChat (Weixin 微信), but also on other media, as their poems travel across different dimensions and spaces, including the digital one. Chapter 3 describes the collective’s official WeChat account as a peculiar “stage” and a digital poetry collection challenging established forms of poetry composition, circulation and reception. Chapter 4 offers a thematic analysis of selected poems, respectively centred on Shanghai and on gender-related issues. If Shanghai is personified as a woman and marked by non-places that are re-humanised and gendered, verses concerned with women’s experience are rendered through a distinctive “body writing” (shenti xiezuo 身体写作), which articulates a trans-corporeal, transformative body, marking the group’s idiosyncratic poetics, aimed at voicing women’s unique perspective on pressing issues of our time. The thesis ends with an appendix containing full translations of the poems.