Marginalised masculinity in the fiction of Mo Yan and Zhu Wen: Socialist residues, struggles, and resilience
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Abstract
This paper examines representations of marginalised masculinity in the fiction of Mo Yan and Zhu Wen, showing how male subjectivity is reshaped by ideological residues of the socialist past and the socio-economic upheavals of post-Mao China. In the late 1990s, state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform and large-scale layoffs produced a precarious population of displaced workers, with employees in crisis-ridden or shuttered factories—both younger and middle-aged—among the hardest hit. Their lives were shaped simultaneously by the lingering legacies of Maoist collectivism and the disruptive forces of market reform. Post-Mao writers increasingly responded to these transformations through new narrative forms that foreground social insecurity, gender anxiety, and the destabilisation of masculine identity. Focusing on Mo Yan’s Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh (1999) and Zhu Wen’s Ah, Xiao Xie (1999), this study addresses a gap in scholarship on Chinese masculinity by offering a gender-focused analysis of marginal male protagonists caught between obsolete socialist certainties and unstable market futures. Approaching these works from a gendered poststructuralist perspective, it explores how they portray men’s struggles, resilience, and failures under conditions of institutional decline and economic insecurity. Through detailed analysis and comparative reading, the paper demonstrates how Mo Yan and Zhu Wen critique the erosion of welfare, challenge dominant gender discourses, and represent masculinity as unstable and contested. In doing so, it contributes to a deeper understanding of marginality, gender crisis, and the broader cultural anxieties surrounding masculinity in post-Mao China.
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