Cold War Femininities in China and America: National Ideals and Uncontainable Performances in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Yang Lüfang's Cuckoo Sings Again

In the study of women’s experiences during the Cold War, their polarization as either US capitalist middle-class housewives or Soviet Union socialist labor heroines has become a key focus. Though women in the US and the Soviet Union lived in different social and cultural milieu, the polarized and generalized categorization of them barely tells the full story of their experience in these nations, nor that of women in other nations during this period. Women’s existence in the Cold War era was much more complicated than the capitalist housewife/socialist labor heroine dichotomy, while the relations of women’s living conditions between nations were also much more diversified than a simple polarization between different camps or homogeneity within the same camp. In this article, I examine the complex differences and similarities of women’s experiences in Cold War China and America, presenting a non-binary understanding of these experiences in two nations that have seen constant conflicts and contestations since the Cold War. Through readings of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Yang Lüfang’s Cuckoo Sings Again, I argue that the construction of ideal femininities in both Cold War China and America ensued from expectations of women’s role in sustaining social and economic stability and national superiority; that in both nations, women’s ambitions in labor, love/sexuality, and family exceeded the constraints imposed by national ideals; and that women who exceeded or failed to conform to these ideals were disciplined through gendered national discourses that pit the opposing nation as the ideological enemy.