Reconstructing Women’s Social Roles and Gendered Experiences in Yu Hua’s Fiction: A Feminist Literary Analysis

Chinedu Emmanuel Okafor — 2026-11-01

This study examines the representation of women, gendered experiences, and changing social roles in Yu Hua’s fiction through a feminist literary framework. Drawing exclusively on the supplied body of scholarship, the study synthesizes research concerning female imagery, patriarchal structures, gender consciousness, violence, narrative transformation, and the changing treatment of women across Yu Hua’s literary development. A qualitative textual-analysis model is developed around four interconnected dimensions: social positioning, patriarchal power, female agency, and narrative transformation. The analysis indicates that women in Yu Hua’s fiction cannot be understood solely as passive figures within male-centered social structures. Their representations frequently reveal tensions between subordination and agency, vulnerability and resilience, and traditional gender expectations and emerging forms of self-definition. Existing scholarship emphasizes both the persistence of patriarchal power and the gradual transformation of female representation in Yu Hua’s writing. The study further argues that the significance of women’s representation lies not only in individual characterization but also in its capacity to expose broader social relations, emotional structures, and gendered inequalities. By integrating these dimensions, the paper proposes a feminist interpretive framework for understanding how Yu Hua’s fiction reconstructs women’s social identities and experiences.

International Journal Of Literature And Languages

Reconstructing Women’s Social Roles and Gendered Experiences in Yu Hua’s Fiction: A Feminist Literary Analysis