Women, Violence, and Agency: The Battered Woman in Zhang Tianyi's Like Snow Like Mountain

Along with sexual harassment, domestic violence has occupied a preeminent position in contemporary Chinese feminist discourses and activism. How has literature responded to the widely felt urgency to expose that which has systematically been concealed, neglected or naturalized? Zhang Tianyi’s 张天翼short story collection Like Snow Like Mountain (Ru xue ru shan 如雪如山, 2022) stands out in the contemporary literary landscape for encouraging a critical reflection on women’s embodied experiences of pain, gender violence, and the relation between women, violence, and agency in post-socialist, neoliberal China. Drawing upon feminist approaches (Burke 2019; Fraser 2009), gender and queer theories (Fahs 2016; bell hooks 1997), and literary studies (Xiao 2022), this paper examines the figure of the battered woman in two of Zhang’s stories as a revealing detail that situates domestic violence at the intersection of various forms of inequality and injustice. By tying domestic violence to larger patterns of marginalization, colonization, and socio-economic unevenness, Zhang’s fiction, I argue, undercuts binary constructions of public and private, victim and perpetrator, as well as passivity and agency. While enabling a critique of multiple, intersecting systems of oppression that are temporally woven in the female body-subject, Zhang’s stories shed light upon the strategies that women employ to carve out a space of self-determination and agency from within the system that oppresses them.