Ingeborg Wikander Den orientaliska kontexten : En intersektionell analys av Wikanders framställning av tre kinesiska medarbetare i KFUK Changsha

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how the Swedish missionary Ingeborg Wikander portrays her Chinese co-workers in the YWCA (KFUK) in Changsha in her travel narrative Fem år i Kina (1923), with Studier och bilder från det nya Kina (1922) as a complementary source, and what power relations this portrayal articulates. Through hermeneutic close reading, three portrayed co-workers, Ngau Chü, Femte fru Tso and the unnamed twenty-one-year-old secretary, are analysed using an intersectional framework of four categories: gender, religion, age and resources. The analysis is situated within the orientalist discursive horizon described by Edward Said, and the postcolonial concepts of mimicry, hybridity and subalternity are introduced as descriptive categories for the patterns the reading uncovers. The results show that class is the most fundamental category in Wikander’s gaze: social capital translates into textual visibility, religion functions as a graded scale in which baptism constitutes completion, and the three postcolonial positions are distributed according to class accessibility. Wikander’s text reproduces the basic structure of orientalism not despite but through the warm and personal character of the relationships; it is the friendship that masks the asymmetry of power and naturalises the hierarchy. The study thereby offers an intersectional refinement of the patterns that previous research has identified at a more aggregated level.