Organizer: Cheryl Barkey, University of California, Davis
Chair: Emily Honig, University of California, Santa Cruz
Discussants: Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz; Emily Honig,
University of California, Santa Cruz
This panel addresses ways in which Chinese activists, artists and social scientists sought to influence popular understandings of health and the body during the onset of "modernity." Though using the rhetoric of transformation, the values they elevated as modern still invoked traditional standards of gender, health and morality.
Larissa Heinrich analyzes representations of madness in Lu Xun's stories Kuangren Riji and Zhufu. She concludes that "Lu Xun's social critique depends upon Chinese medicine for its central metaphors, and also presumes the reader's uncritical understanding of class and gender relationships."
Cheryl Barkey's paper reveals how eugenics was presented in the 1920s and 30s as a scientific solution to colonialism and the perceived threat of racial extinction. Pan Guangdan, the primary exponent of eugenics in China, "resurrected aspects of a conservative gender ideology which was under heavy attack by May Fourth intellectuals."
Jiang Jin describes how an all-female opera troupe in Shanghai actively employed the traditional concept of qingbai or purity to "reform their theater and to transform the representations of the female body from the erotic to the morally pure."
Illness and Gender in the Fiction of Lu Xun
Larissa Heinrich, University of California, Berkeley
Despite Lu Xun's sharp criticism of Chinese medical practitioners as "quack doctors" and his literary use of failed Chinese medical cures to represent larger social failings, many of his stories rely on this same tradition for pathos as well as for the effectiveness of the allegory. In this paper I read Lu Xun's famous stories Kuangren Riji (Diary of a Madman) and Zhufu (The New Year's Sacrifice) against each other, focusing on their different uses of madness and illness in order to highlight different Chinese models from which they derive.
I begin by outlining the symptomatology of madness as described in the Chinese medical classic Huangdi Neijing, pointing out the classifications of madness into two kinds: dian(excess of yin) and kuang (excess of yang). Next I argue that the madness identified in the title of Kuangren Rijiis the same one associated with kuang madness, while the behavior of Zhufu's female protagonist, who is commonly seen as representing the tragic consequences of the self-destructiveness of Chinese society, is symptomatic of the dian variety of madness. Showing this classification of madness to be consistent with the gendered breakdown of literary representations of tuberculosis, consumption and cannibalism-as-cure in other of his works, I conclude that Lu Xun's social critique depends upon Chinese medicine for its central metaphors, and also presumes the reader's uncritical understanding of class and gender relationships.
"Superior Birth": Pan Guangdan and Eugenics as Confucian Family Values
Cheryl Barkey, University of California, Davis
In the first half of this century, eugenics movements appeared in many parts of the world but the significance and content of these movements varied from country to country. In China in the 1920s, a number of intellectuals promoted eugenics, originally a western concept, as a way for China to stave off colonialism and the threat of racial extinction. Pan Guahgdan, an American-trained sociologist and China's leading promoter of eugenics, saw eugenics as a scientific solution to China's international position.
In addition, Pan's version of eugenics resurrected aspects of a conservative gender ideology which was under heavy attack by May Fourth intellectuals. Pan advocated eugenics as a way of countering western-style social reforms such as free-choice marriage and women's education which he saw as endangering the Chinese nation and race. In eugenics, Pan found scientific validation of "traditional" Confucian social practices such as arranged marriage, joint families and female seclusion. By linking scientific justifications to conservative values, Pan challenged socially reformist intellectuals who claimed science legitimization for their agenda. By highlighting the multiple meanings and uses of the concept of eugenics, I show that the process of modernization in China was far more complex than the adoption of western ideas.
Morality, Modernity, and the Female Body: The Rise of Modern Actresses in
Republican Shanghai
Jiang Jin, Stanford University
In traditional Chinese society, the Confucian moral discourse designated the term qingbai, literally pure and clean, to describe women from good families. This being the case, a woman's ability to utilize this term became itself a marker of her social status. During the 1930s and 1940s, an increasing use of qingbai to inform a discourse of morality concerning female movie stars and opera singers, marginal women in traditional categorization, signals a process of modernization which transformed the female body, restructured public morality and produced new identities.
Centering on the notion qingbai, I describe how actresses as a social group rose from the bottom to socio-cultural prominence. The case under concern is Yueju in Shanghai, an opera in which all roles were played by women. The case suggests that despite their low status, the actresses were able to exercise power and maneuver among social ruptures to negotiate a better position for themselves. They endorsed a reformist discourse and used it to elevate their social status and forge a new identity. They solicited help from liberal left-wing intellectuals in their resistance to exploitation and oppression and thereby inadvertently allied with the CCP's socialist revolution. They volunteered to reform their theater and to transform the representation of the female body from the erotic to the morally pure, and thus helped to disseminate a reformist message to an illiterate or semi-literate audience. In so doing, the actresses were active participants in China's modern transformation.