Organizer: Deborah Tze-lan Sang, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: Lydia H. Liu, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: Susan Glosser, Lewis and Clark College
Engaging previously little researched urban cultural material such as women's magazines, serialized fiction, popular music and cinema in China from the first half of the twentieth century, scholars on this panel explore the crucial role of mass media in modern Chinese ideological formation and contention. Panelists attempt to develop nuanced frameworks for assessing the vitality and diversity of metropolitan cultural economy or exchange, to properly understand the tension between heteroglossia and the desire for persuasion as well as control in public forum and mass entertainment. Among other things, panelists locate in early media representations of women exemplary articulations of divergent or competing interests which could neither be collapsed nor subsumed under a totalizing political agenda.
Sylvia Li-chun Lin researches early republican women's magazines, and she finds their multifarious promotion of the "new woman" far exceeds a monolithic concern for national survival. Feng-ying Ming traces the uncomfortable tension between nationalism and sexual pleasure/politics to the pre-republican period, questioning nationalism as an adequate framework for evaluating the images of exotic, erotic female beauties in late Qing serialized political-detective novels. Deborah Tze-lan Sang reconstructs the urban discourse on female homosexuality during the 1920s and early 1930s, examining the popularization of sexual knowledge and the hotchpotch of feminist, nationalist, pornographic or scientific rhetoric deployed for or against homosexuality. Last but not least, Andrew Jones spotlights and analyzes the female body and voice in wartime Shanghai popular culture as objects of desire, onto which contending political ideologies are inscribed.
Exoticism, Eroticism, and Nationalism: Women in Early Modern Chinese
Political-Detective Novels (1898-1911)
Feng-ying Ming, Middlebury College
In the early modern period of Chinese literature, a new image of woman emerges. Here we find stories of "exotic overseas beauties," both Chinese beauties in foreign lands as well as foreign beauties in China in a large corpus of Political-Detective novels. Integrated with the prototypical Chinese beauty and the western revolutionary heroine, these overseas beauties mimic western forms of social etiquette, dress codes, are educated in western subject matters, and moreover, often employ erotic acts, assassination, and magical tricks in the name of radical political activities. Written mostly by male literati-writers, these stories illustrate the process where gender politics is complicated by the discourse of nationalism and eroticism in the specific context of early modern China.
In re-reading these novels, I wish to unpack the construction of the women in detail, and to take issue with the theoretical framework concerning the relationship between sexuality and nationalism widely adopted by scholars in Chinese studies and other third world studies. The issues I look into include: What complexities are involved when we perceive "one" politics (such as sexuality) in terms of an "other" (such as of nationalism)? And how do we perceive the so-called intellectual horizon as a shifting expression of equilibrium among the many forces that constitute the horizon: gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationalism, narrative?
The novels used in this study are from late Qing magazines such as Zhejiangchao, Xinxin xiaoshuo, and Xiaoshuo Shibao .
Contending Voices: An Alternative Look at the Formation and Promotion of a New
Chinese Woman in Women's Magazines
Sylvia Li-chun Lin, University of California, Berkeley
In the early part of the twentieth century, many Chinese women's magazines explored ideas concerning the "new woman" (xin nuxing). These magazines, such as Funu Zazhi(The Ladies' Journal), Funu Shibao (Women's Times), and Xin Nuxing (New Woman), published many essays introducing and promoting Western feminist ideas, and attacking traditional Chinese notions of womanhood. Articles in these magazines covered almost every aspect of women's lives, imparting knowledge in the domestic sphere and instilling political ideas. The coverage of these magazines invariably asked the following critical questions: Who is entitled to decide what the new woman should be? What should the new woman consist of? What are the purposes of the construction of the new woman? What is the future of this new woman? These questions were echoed in literary works. For example, Zhang Tianyi's "A Man Who Searches for Excitement" (Zhaoxun ciji de ren ), Mao Dun's "Creation" (Chuangzao), and Lu Xun's "Regret for the Past" (Shangshi) all explore different issues concerning the new Chinese woman. Although nationalism was a major concern at this time, the magazines and literary works nevertheless disclosed a complexity that went beyond the concerns for national survival.
In this paper, I examine several of the women's magazines to investigate the formation and promotion of this "new women." It is commonly believed that the inception of the new Chinese women-part of the women's movement in China-was often dictated by the nationalistic agenda of national rejuvenation and salvation. However, closer examination of Chinese women's magazines reveals a far more complicated picture of the formation of new Chinese womanhood. By examining these women's magazines and three short stories, I argue that the contention over this new Chinese women indicates a multifarious propagation of new Chinese women's identities that defies monolithic nationalistic reading.
Passionate Friends: Female Homosexuality in Chinese Magazines, Sexological
Pamphlets, and Fiction, 1922-1932
Deborah Tze-lan Sang, University of California, Berkeley
Most scholarly researches into desire and sex in modern China have facilely excluded the question of homosexuality. In this paper, I shall reconstruct a significant but hitherto neglected May Fourth discourse on tongxing ai (same-sex love), with material gleaned from magazines, medical pamphlets, and fiction published during the 1920s and early 1930s. While the concept of tongxing ai was distinct from traditional Chinese notions of homosexuality precisely for its inclusion of female and male forms in the same category, I shall attend to the representation of female homosexuality (nüzide tongxing ai) in particular reading it against a backdrop of heated debates over Chinese women's socio-political situation at the time.
The emergence of the discourse on nüzide tongxing aiin the 1920s can be understood in the context of Chinese intellectuals' desire for science, here, specifically, sexology and psychology. Competing conceptual paradigms, value judgments and neologisms were introduced to the urban Chinese public when such European authorities on homosexual research as Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis, as well as Japanese material for sex education, were translated. In modern vernacular (baihua) fiction, both male and female writers displayed their observations and fantasies of female homoerotic desires focusing on the boarding school as an especially potent romantic site. Tracing translators' and writers' agendas, I attempt to complicate our understanding of May Fourth Chinese feminism, sexual taboos/politics, as well as the causes of modernity and national health as strategies of legitimation.
Women in the Discursive and Political Economy of Shanghai Popular Music and
Cinema, 1937-45
Andrew F. Jones, University of California, Berkeley
Wartime Shanghai was the golden age of Chinese popular music ( shidai qu) and the entertainment cinema with which it was closely intertwined. It was also an era in which the mass media became a site for intense political and cultural struggle, the contours and complexities of which have largely been ignored by critics eager to dismiss the leisure culture of the time as a collaborationist, decadent, 'colonized,' and even 'pornographic' opiate for the masses.
In this paper, I argue that representations of women play an integral role in the articulation of the various ideological struggles which characterize the leisure culture of the era. In part, this is because the Shanghai film and recording industries were predicated on a 'star system' which produced a galaxy of female actresses/singers, and only a handful of popular male leads. For this reason, much of the paper is devoted to tracing the careers of several of the female stars of the silver screen and gramophone record onto whose bodies and voices contending ideologies were inscribed.
The paper explores the ways in which both the on and off-screen images of women like Zhou Xuan, Chen Yunshang, and Bai Guang become sites for the articulation of divergent positions vis-à-vis issues of nationalism and cultural colonization, modernity and tradition, and of course, gender. Finally, it explores how these discursive configurations change over three distinct historical moments: the immediate pre-war period (1936-7), the "Orphan Island" period (1937-41), and the Japanese occupation (1941-45).