My dissertation, "The Legacy of the Maoist Gender Project in Contemporary China", uses feminist theories to analyze women's oral life stories, especially the various ways the Maoist gender idea manifests itself in Chinese women's lives today. Building on Judith Butler's theories of "gender as performance", I introduced the concept of gender as a "project" to convey both conscious manipulation at the collective level, and personal agency for individuals. I included detailed analysis of four cases including a rural migrant worker, an older urban woman who lived through the Mao era, a lesbian artist, and a woman who studied and lived in the West before returning to China. The analysis of content is complemented by a discussion of the structure and language of each narrative, including an innovative interviewing method of "telling and retelling" and hybrid narrative language—various mixtures of official dialect, regional dialects, imported terms, and visual representations.