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Sample Personal Statement for Interdisciplinary Studies in
Sociology
My mother was almost muffled to death by my grandparents the moment
she was born, simply because she was a girl instead of a boy of the
family. It was the sympathetic neighbors who came to her rescue
seconds before she breathed her last breaths. Several decades later,
the similar fate of being sexually discriminated occurred to her
daughter: I was ordered by my parents to discontinue my education just
as I was finishing my junior high school. To them, the fact that I am
female in gender itself ensured that there could be no bright future
for me, however well-educated I could possibly become. Even though, as
time passed, I entered a prestigious university in my capacity as the
top student of my county at the highly competitive nationwide entrance
examination and even though I have made considerable achievements in
my professional career after my graduation, I have largely been
overlooked in a male-dominated world and I encounter much greater
disadvantages in getting promoted than my male counterparts. What is
especially outrageous is that one evening when putting up in a hotel
during a business travel, one of my male colleagues attempted a sexual
molest on me and when rejected, he spread rumors to damage my
reputation. Even though I tried to defend myself, my colleagues
refused to believe me and I had to undergo all the shame and
humiliation. The reason was simple – I am female in gender. To a large
extent, those bizarre experiences of mine represent in miniature the
frustrations and the dilemmas of contemporary Chinese women.
As a senior journalist of Hunan Provincial TV Station, I have had too
many opportunities to witness the dire conditions of Chinese women,
especially in rural areas, and to deplore over their pathetic status.
If a poor rural family cannot afford proper education to its children,
it is always the daughter who is first forced to quit school, and
there is no exception to this rule. Since the so-called reform and
opening-up campaign of China over the past decades, the market
economy, heavily tinted with a capitalistic nature, has produced both
positive and negative effects on women’s lives. An increasingly number
of women from poor rural areas have flown into cities, only to become
prostitutes and frequently their families take this for granted,
feeling comforted in the income that their daughters can bring. Moral
standards are deteriorating especially rapidly.
All those indicate the particularly complicated nature of the status
of contemporary Chinese women. In literature, a female character named
Pan Jinglian in the classical novel Jinpinmei---A Story of Three Women
has been interpreted in diametrically opposite fashions by critics
over the past century, from the symbol of licentiousness to that of
the warrior of women’s liberation with the rise of feminist criticism.
According to one traditional Chinese concept, the low intelligence of
women itself can constitute their greatest virtue. Traditional Chinese
society’s prejudice against learned women has resulted in a vicious
cycle: the less education women receive, the lower intelligence they
develop, the more prejudiced the society becomes against them.
Although in law women are accorded equal constitutional rights as men
when the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, Chinese
women’s status since 1980’s has actually decreased with the worsening
of inflation and unemployment. Apart from increasing prostitution,
some economists even proposed that women should go home from their
jobs to make room for the redundant male labor. As has been elaborated
on by political economics in Marxism, the advanced mode of capitalist
production has created economic improvement of the Chinese society,
but it has also led to the alienation of human nature as embodied in
prostitution. In this dehumanizing process, women are the greatest
victims. In this regard, Marxism has already incorporated some
penetrating criticism of the evils of capitalism. But I believe that
more perceptive interpretations of the changing conditions of
contemporary Chinese women can be developed from the perspectives
other than Marxism.
All those fall into the category of gender politics (sometimes
referred to as sexual politics) and to me those issues have been as
puzzling as they are frustrating until I started reading works by
Western scholars, including the pioneering research done by on sexual
politics by Kate Millet in Sexual Politics and Kathleen Barry in The
Prostitution of Sexuality. I find myself become increasingly
enlightened by the refreshingly original ideas of those western
authors, different from the doctrinaire education I have received so
far within the conventional framework of Chinese education. The spirit
of criticism, the in-depth scholarly insights, and unique research
perspectives as represented by those western writers are what I myself
would like to develop in my prospective program. I have eventually
come to the realization that a proper understanding of Chinese women’s
complicated status has to borrow the western scholarly research
findings. In my future studies, I would like to examine the status of
Chinese women from the perspective of western feminism and to put it
into a theoretical framework, and try to seek some philosophical
solutions to the issue. Another task for me is to discover the
distinctive features of the problems facing contemporary Chinese women
in this are of dramatic social changes, including their sense of
disillusionment, displacement, and their desires. In addition, my
unique background as a typical Chinese woman is what I can contribute
to your interdisciplinary program.
I majored in Chinese Language and Literature as an undergraduate. As a
student of humanities, I have also received systematic education and
training in history and philosophy, both Chinese and Western. My
scores in such courses as Social Psychology， History of Western
Philosophy, History of Life Science, History of Natural Sciences,
Theory of Marxism， are unusually high, as can be evidenced in my
Academic Transcript. As a journalist, I have covered extremely wide
ranges of social issues in contemporary China, with special emphasis
on women’s status. This has allowed me to accumulate rich social
experiences, develop ample empirical knowledge and gain insights into
the problems in the real world. Those qualifications should prepare me
perfectly for the interdisciplinary sociological studies in the Draper
Program.
A tentative title for my Master’s thesis topic can be Gender Politics
in Contemporary China. To develop myself into a woman scholar on
gender politics, an area of pioneering studies in China, will be my
academic goal and the interdisciplinary and intercultural trainings I
shall receive in the Draper Program will properly enable me to arrive
at my academic goal. I will follow a series of demonstrable,
verifiable steps, using an objective method of analysis. By exercising
the unique perspectives of a literary critic, a creative writer and a
journalist, I wish to add to the understanding of the status of
Chinese woman and contribute to the China’s feminist politics and to
the feminist studies within a sociopolitical framework. |
