Dottorato in CIVILTÀ DELL’ASIA E DELL’AFRICA

Titolo della tesi: 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. Significantly, the group employs social media for literary purposes while maintaining traditional print publication, within both the “official” and “unofficial” spheres. Chapter 2 explores how they turn Baudelaire’s flâneur into the flâneuse and how flânerie characterises their modi poetandi, particularly on WeChat (Weixin 微信). 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. The thesis ends with an appendix containing full translations of the poems.