Illness Writing and Subjectivity Construction in Diaries of Republican-Era Women

Ruiying Zhang

Simen Owen Academic Proceedings Series, 2026, vol. 4, 50-57

Abstract: During the Republican era (1912-1949), Chinese women increasingly turned to diary writing as a medium for articulating experiences of illness amid rapid social and medical transformation. While existing scholarship has examined women's autobiographical texts through literary or social-historical lenses, it often treats the body as metaphorical or marginalizes illness as a passive condition, overlooking its role in shaping epistemic agency. Addressing this gap, this study employs qualitative textual analysis of three anonymized archival diaries from the late 1920s, mid-1930s, and early 1940s, selected for their sustained engagement with physical and mental suffering, medical encounters, and reflective narration. Analysis is guided by four dimensions: symptom lexicon, portrayal of medical authority, narrative agency, and intertextual framing. Findings reveal that diarists consistently reinterpreted illness not as weakness but as a site of critical knowledge, challenging diagnostic dismissal, resisting gendered state ideologies, and asserting bodily specificity against national allegory. Their narratives are marked by fragmentation and chronicity, rejecting restitution models in favor of non-linear, embodied temporality. This research contributes to transnational medical humanities by demonstrating how private writing functioned as a technology of epistemic sovereignty for women whose voices were excluded from public and clinical discourse. It further calls for historically grounded, non-Western approaches to illness narrative that recognize lay interpretation as legitimate knowledge production.

Keywords: illness narrative; Republican-era China; women's diaries; embodied knowledge; medical authority (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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