Alternative Paths to Equality in Zhuangzi: an Asian Feminist Perspective

Abstract

This article explores the possibility of an Asian feminist reading of the Zhuangzi as a way of appropriating Asian religious and cultural resources for the liberation of women and men. Through a close reading of Zhuangzi’s “discussion about equalizing things” in its original language, it explores alternative paths to equality suggested in the Daoist wisdom tradition. Zhuangzi’s subversive wisdom, characterized by radical pluralism based on the respect for difference and otherness and by an alternative identity politics based on interdependence and mutual transformation between things, provides an alternative both to Confucian collectivism and to Western individualism, characterized by hierarchical worldviews that create the dichotomy of the subject/self/human and the object/other/nature and marginalize “the Other,” including women.