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In this article I analyze a changben (song book) ballad of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai transliterated into nüshu ("female writing"), a script circulated exclusively among peasant women in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, China. Conceptualizing genre as the intertextualization of an event, narrative poetics, and social context, I will discuss how the male-composed Liang-Zhu narrative ballad was read and received by nüshu women in rural Jiangyong, and through this process trace out the expressive niches of the changben genre. I will show that despite its transcription into nüshu, the Liang-Zhu changben narrative did not merely mirror Jiangyong women's life worlds. Instead, it reflected and in the meantime refracted their inner feelings and social reality. Reflection and refraction intersect to create an expressive arena where audiences articulate their intricate sensibilities of conforming to the existing social order while simultaneously transforming it, and where they can project unrealistic but fulfilling fantasies of existence. Through changben, they contemplate being in-the-world, probing beneath the surface of existence, and searching for hope in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I investigate how peasant women in Jiangyong County of southern Hunan defined and practiced a female-specific written script known as nüshu ('female writing'). With an emphasis on sisterhood relationships, I explore how women employed nüshu to construct meaning, experience autonomy, and acknowledge the androcentric impositions made upon them, which in turn highlights the dual nature of nüshu literacy. On the one hand, nüshu empowered women by allowing them to expand female connections beyond the confines of male-derived familial ties and village boundaries; on the other hand, it embodied Jiangyong peasant women's frustration over their failure to sustain such connections after marriage. To contrast nüshu with the gentry women's literary communities in the Lower Yangzi region during late imperial China, this research demonstrates how literacy dynamically interacts with the social forces of gender and class. Whereas female literati's social networks were able to expand and be sustained and even succeeded in penetrating male scholarly circles, nüshu sisterhood communities often failed to survive in face of the challenges set by village exogamy, mainly due to the lack of male support and to Jiangyong's rural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]