Organizer: Ling Xiao, Brown University
Chair and Discussant: Perry Link, Princeton University
The advent of modern printing and publishing radically redefined the relations of both authors and the public with cultural processes and with each other. This interdisciplinary panel problematizes the conventional distinction between production and reception by revealing cultural formation as an outcome of interactions between authors, agents, and audiences. Taking this perspective, the panelists investigate the diverse ways in which traditional notions of sexuality were being refashioned or reconfirmed through writings and images.
Each panelist will address the discourse of sexuality in the context of emerging radicalism and consumerism, with particular emphasis on constructions of self, class, and modernity. Jing Wang opens up our discussion by examining self-expression in the autobiography of Lu Yin within the larger context of its interpenetration with her public images created by the critics and readership based on their views of gender and sexual morals. Carrie Waara draws our attention to the gendered articulation of middle-class identity and Chinese modernity in pictorial magazines and raises the possibility of reimagining modernity in the female body. A similar concern with popular magazine texts and their construction of reader relations with the female subject informs Shelley Stephenson’s paper. Her study demonstrates the subtle reinforcement of traditional gender roles in Shanghai fan magazines by encouraging heteroerotic fantasy on the part of the readership. Finally, Ling Xiao explores the construction of a new sexual morality among radical intellectuals within a changing historical frame and highlights their frustration in fighting a two-front war against both their ideological foes and economic competitors in an effort to sell cultural radicalism as a commodity. Together, the four papers open up multiple ways to tap the dynamics of the discourse of sexuality while adding to our understanding of the reconfiguration of cultural relationships in the era of print culture.
Text as Space: The Reworking of Sexuality into Textuality in The Autobiography of Lu Yin
Jing Wang, Ohio State University
A respected female writer of the New Literary Movement in the 1920s, Lu Yin’s (1898–1934) personal life was continually a scandal—renouncing her engagement, marrying a man with a wife from an arranged marriage, and later developing a romantic commitment to someone ten years her junior. According to the author and her contemporaries, both the reading public and the literary circle perceived Lu Yin’s behavior as deviating too far from the gender and sexual norms of the time. I argue that The Autobiography of Lu Yin (1934) form part of the historical and cultural environment of multiple voices on gender and female sexuality as unraveled in the three-way dynamics among author, readers, and critics. Lu Yin talks back to the public and vindicates herself as a writer in her self-representational text. Consequently most narrative space is devoted to her literary activities and teaching career, while emotional and sexual involvement is minimized so that it emerges only out of a referential context of chronicling her publications. Meanwhile, mainstream literary criticism, with its emphasis on the social function of literature, brings into the dialogic scenario its own set of expectations of Lu Yin as a writing female of the May Fourth period. Erasing as an individualist both the woman who practiced free love and the autobiographer, critics judge Lu Yin as she fits or departs from their paradigms.
The Bare Truth: Nudes, Sex, and the Modernization Project in Shanghai Pictorials
Carrie Waara, Castleton State College
The female nude is a significant presence in Meishu Shenghuo, a prominent art pictorial of Republican Shanghai. Western fine art nudes as well as paintings, sculpture, and photographs of nude subjects by Chinese artists frequently appear in the magazine as part of its modernization project: to foster "a commanding view of the world" in order to develop the human ability to control things in terms of truth, rational calculation, authenticity, and/or beauty. Representations of nudes thus secured for the editors vivid credentials of their expertise in translating Western modernity for Chinese society.
Yet this new convention for portraying women in China also presents problems of spectatorship for the target audience of middle-class women readers. Historically, the female nude presumes the dominant spectatorship of men, linked with sexuality, voyeurism, and power. The nude’s association with uncontrolled sexuality, prostitution, and the social degeneracy of urban entertainment districts also conflicts with the ideology of domesticity the magazine fostered. Nonetheless, the editors suggest that the vitality of human sexuality might revivify Chinese art and culture.
Meishu shenghuo and other periodicals’ treatments of the human subject, clothed and unclothed, were part of a project to create a new, modern cultural identity that redefined Chinese middle-class femininity and masculinity. This paper contributes a new understanding of the construction of gender by pictorial magazines produced in Shanghai from 1912–1937. The rise of the pictorial press at that time underscores the power of representation and its relation to China’s modern culture.
"Wanting Art? Wanting Love?": Rhetorics of Romance in Occupied Shanghai’s Film Fan Press
Shelley Stephenson, University of Chicago
Shanghai’s fan press of the 1940s communicated to its readership a clear model for how fans should view film stars: platonic admiration for the star’s artistic achievement. Aspiring to more romantic hopes was admonished, such behavior categorized as "silliness" or even "mental illness" on the part of the fan. Negative examples, in the form of intercepted love letters from fan to star, were offered by the magazines to drive these lessons home to the readership. Yet like their Hollywood counterparts, the magazines were also highly sexualized, with a counter-discourse running through the texts tantalizing the readership with the promise of romance, and indeed suggesting that the relation between star and fan mirror that of lovers in the courting ritual.
This paper investigates the historical context and broader theoretical implications of this apparent contradiction, with particular attention to its role in gender patterning. While these texts positioned fans and stars into relations based on the romantic heterosexual ideal, their overt message enjoined readers to appreciate film as art, and the tension between these two discourses impacted differently on the possibilities afforded male and female fan expression and star status. Beyond the relevance of these texts within discussions of the star system and fan culture, then, is the function they perform in promoting traditional gender roles, all the while claiming that, in ideal terms, film "as art" should be about surpassing these concerns.
Selling Sexuality: Profits and Politics in Women’s Magazines in Republican China
Ling Xiao, Brown University
In examining the complex interplay between the symbolic and economic forces in cultural production and consumption, this paper takes as its entry point two pivotal events in the career of Zhang Xicheng, editor and author of progressive women’s magazines. The first occurred in January 1925, when Zhang edited a special issue of Women’s Magazine (Funu zazhi) on "new sexual morality" to openly advocate new sexual freedom. The result was Zhang’s dismissal for provoking an ideological debate with the liberal quarter of the new intelligentsia, and the founding of New Women (Xin Nuxing), a monthly edited and published independently by Zhang. The radical stand on issues of gender and sexuality that continued in the new magazine made it an enormous financial success. The second event came in November 1928, when Zhang published a special issue discussing "new norms of sexual love" promoted by the Russian Communist-feminist Aleksandra Kollontai. At the peak of the magazine’s radicalism, Zhang was forced by his economic competitors to turn away from his target audience of the high-profiled "new youth" to the mundane "middle school student" after which Xin Nuxing ceased publication.
This paper explores the dynamics of the dialogic relationship between editor, authors and readership that led to the publication of these two special issues, as well as the symbolic struggles and economic competition that shaped their reception. Sex and radicalism functioned differently in the competition for positions in the cultural field and profit in the marketplace. Publishers and editors who tried to carve out an elite social and cultural existence in a consumer culture, found themselves forced to navigate between the shoals of cultural positions and economic necessity. The result was ideological moderation.