#hezhen

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Lady’s Mantle

Nanai/ Nani / Hèzhézú / Hezhen

ca. 1880; Amur-Ussuri region, Siberia

Fishskin

I'm an active member on the gradcafe, which is a popular forum for future and current graduate students across disciplines to discuss various issues within the humanities and social sciences. Today, I received a message from a fellow member who inquired more information on a form of radical feminism known officially in the field of gender study as anarcho-feminism (an unsounding combination of anarchism and feminism). Thus, I was inspired to follow up with this concept and prone to giving out some fundamental ideas on the history of anarcho-feminism, specifically as in how it worked and developed. Caveat: I'm not quite familiar with the concept in the contextualization of the Euro-American world. The only anarcho-feminist I know from that area of focus was Emma Goldman, so these information will very much likely to apply to East Asia. There is no guarantee that anarcho-feminism will remain consistent regardless of geographical differences.

The term itself suggests a combination: anarchism and feminism. This combination may strike many readers as strange and ideologically impossible. In fact, anarcho-feminism was among one of the popular schools of social theories with a good number of followers, emerging in China at the turn of the 20th century. A prominent leader of the movement was Hezhen- a newly discovered scholar whose significant works on anarchism and feminism revealed a tremendous amount of information on the state of women's status at a time of national chaos, and salvation-seeking Chinese nation-state. Anarcho-feminism exerted its influences on many women's movements of the time, one of which being the first wave feminism discourse consisting of a major, ultimate goal: fighting for women's suffrage. Lying at the core of anarcho-feminism were the distinctive notion of patriarchy being promoted by a hierarchical system existing in the society that resulted from a centralized political system and government, and the complete abandonment of the male's authoritative selves. Basically, anarcho-feminists deemed the collapse of a governing nation-state to be necessary in the liberation of women because state existence gave way to the deliberate construction of social hierarchy. Patriarchy, after all, is a byproduct of nation-state formation of social ladders. The root of all women's suppression must lie in nation-state and its destruction is principal to a fulfilling quest of class struggle.

Practically, anarcho-feminism was not successful. It is purely a theory of radicalism that was advocated by theorists/feminists such as He Zhen and Emma Goldman. While the former pointed out an inextricable link between state destruction, liberation and class struggle, the latter pushed the theory to extremity by advocating a futureless vision of the women's liberation, which emphasized that the shortcomings of the women's liberation discourse were made recurrent due to the fact that women first had to liberate themselves from the idea of being liberated. Second, any vision of a nation-state, or close to the formation of it will cause disruption to anarcho-feminist practice. The "no-future" attitude reinforced Goldman's ideals of disallowing the existence of hierarchy and moreover gave a full blow to the slightest possibility of nation-state reemergence, which was critical to any governing bodies.

This is an interesting field both in terms of history and social theory studies. For more complete discussion of anarcho-feminism, please refer to the following sources: 

Emma Goldman, "Anarchism and Other Essays"

Various essays by He Zhen including "On the Revenge of Women" and "On Women's Liberation" 

Peter Zarrow, "He Zhen and Anarcho-Feminism in China" on JSTOR

Rebecca Karl, "On Women's Labor: He Zhen, Anarcho-feminism and 20th Century China in the World" Link: http://www.tanianavarroswain.com.br/labrys/labrys15/china/rebecca.htm