Like Snow Like Mountain: Narrating Gender Violence in the Era of #MeToo Activism

Like Snow Like Mountain (2022) is a short story collection by the emerging Chinese woman writer Zhang Tianyi (1984–). The collection explores women’s embodied experiences of pain, physical and emotional, paying special attention to harassment and violence. In the era of #MeToo movements, Like Snow Like Mountain emerges as both a testimony of women’s suffering and a critical intervention into discourses and practices of gender violence in post-socialist, neoliberal China. Drawing on gender theories, feminist approaches, and literary studies, this chapter interrogates the collection’s contribution to understandings of gender violence and the relationship between women, violence, and agency in the backdrop of #MeToo activism. The analysis of representations of sexual harassment and the figure of the battered woman shows how Zhang’s fiction destabilizes gendered dichotomies such as public/private, passivity/agency or victim/perpetrator, underscoring the intersection of gender-based violence and other forms of inequality formed along gender, sexual, age, class, and racial lines.