Organizer: Sandra Hyde, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz
The proposed panel is structured to offer a conversation across disciplines on prostitution from the late Qing to contemporary post-Mao China. This topic is a source of continuous contention and attraction among feminist scholars, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, and more recently, HIV/AIDS activists in China. Studies of prostitution are not only about exploiting the female body and pleasuring the male body, but about the ambiguities that the practices and the representations of sex work generate. Issues of agency and power, control and policing, desire and sex echo each other in the participants’ papers. This interdisciplinary and intertextual approach provides new insights into studies of jinu.
Since the committee encourages creative panel formats, the proposed panel, while traditional in our presentation of papers, will be experimental in our discussion. Instead of one discussant, the panelists from different disciplines (political science, anthropology, history and literary criticism) will discuss each other’s work. Paola Zamperini’s paper will examine the borders of male and female where supernatural beings become prostitutes, and males becomes females in writings in the late Qing. Second, Elizabeth Remick will examine the policing of prostitution in Republican era Guangdong, to explain that taxation served many other functions than just to control prostitution. Finally, Sandra Hyde examines representations of prostitution and ethnicity in contemporary Xishuangbanna when Han women masquerade as Dai prostitutes.
A Whore is Born: The Transgenderal Odyssey of a Courtesan-To-Be
Paola Zamperini, University of California, Berkeley
The present paper explores the birth of the courtesan as sex-worker as we find it envisioned in Wu Woyao’s Haishang mingji si da jingang. In this Orlando ante litteram, four male gods, propelled by their cravings for carnal pleasures, undergo a sex change and end up becoming Shanghai’s most famous courtesans. The odyssey of these characters reveals how, in late Qing fiction, the body, first male and divine, then female and human, and at last divine and animal, is the main text on which gender, class, and the practice of sexuality are inscribed. Though a commodity herself, the courtesan is presented as the main subject of desire and consumption, and as such she reverses the established hierarchies of power.
The experience of sexual pleasure goes through the physical female body of the courtesan, over which she retains constant control. Blurring the boundaries between the superhuman and the human, her body, through which money, semen, and disease constantly flow, is constructed to mimic and repeat the endless cycle of a budding capitalist economy in which lust for commodities (sex, drugs, modern gadgets) begets only desire for more. By focusing on this truly embodied discourse on desire, this paper illuminates how literary representations of prostitution and sex-work, through the mediation of gods-cum-whores, enhance our understanding of late Qing configurations of sex and gender roles.
Passing as Dai-Lue: Han Prostitutes and the Performance of Ethnicity in Contemporary Jinghong
Sandra Hyde, University of California, Berkeley
This paper takes the reader to China’s post-Mao hinterland to the city of Jinghong, the Xishuangbanna. Jinghong is used here as a window onto contemporary practices of prostitution in China. Sex work within a Chinese governed Dai minority autonomous region constitutes what Manderson and Jolly (1998) call a "site of desire." This "site of desire" encompasses a vision of modernity that develops through travelling Han male patrons who seek sexual favors from local "Dai" prostitutes. Previous studies of prostitution often rely on the unproblematized binary between the exploited female prostitutes and their exploiting male customers; however, these neat binary oppositions cannot fully address the nuances involved in sex work in Jinghong. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews from 1996 and 1997 with customers and sex workers in Jinghong, the author explores representations of women in the Xishuangbanna that reveals not only images of virtuous Han wives and unvirtuous Dai girls, but several other categories. What is most important is that the majority of prostitutes are Han women who act and dress as Dai women—here Dai ethnicity is performed for Han men who buy into a mimesis of the exotic Dai. This ethnographic view of the multiple identities and representations of prostitution in Jinghong reveals a more complex picture than just the exploited female prostitute and her exploiting male customer, and it enhances our understanding of prostitution and ethnicity in post-Mao China.
Engendering China: Prostitution, Taxation, and the State in Republican Guangdong
Elizabeth Remick, Tufts University
Recent work by Gail Hershatter on Republican China has argued that gender and sexuality are important political issues because they provide new windows onto understanding the growth of the ideas of modernity, nationalism and identity in China. This paper seeks to argue that there was an even more direct material relationship between gender, sexuality and power, and the creation of the modern state. In Guangdong counties in the 1920s and 1930s state institutions were often financed largely by revenues from taxes on female prostitution. Without these taxes on women’s sexual labor, male elite efforts to build new social and political organizations—local legislatures, orphanages, police and schools—those that we recognize as modern could not have been realized. Modern local institutions such as the police and schools in these counties did not arise only from a gendered ideology of modernization, but were made possible by the material proceeds of the sexual labor of women. The extent to which this same pattern has been repeated in other regions of China deserves the attention of sinologists.