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Cross-Cultural Femininities and Masculinities: Sino-Western Cultural Interaction in the Qing and Republican Eras
Organizer: Melissa Dale, University of San Francisco
Chair: Emma Teng, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Discussant: Ellen Widmer, Wesleyan University
The panel will provide a forum for the discussion of gender identity as a form of Sino-Western cultural interaction. Panelists will examine how masculinities and femininities are constructed across cultures. Papers will analyze how foreign cultures in China and the Chinese with whom they interacted negotiated the cultural and gender divide. Melissa Dale examines how the Chinese interpreted/constructed the chastity and celibacy of foreign priests and finds that with eunuchs and Buddhist monks as the frame of reference, Christian celibates tested the boundaries of Chinese concepts of masculinity during the Qing. Ji Li investigates the gender relations of Chinese female Catholics and foreign priests in the mid to late 1800s. Analyzing these women’s letters, Li finds that gender relations, evangelism, and cross-cultural communication became intertwined in rural Northeast China. Motoe Sasaki examines the educational enterprises of American women as they worked to create the “new woman” in China and discovers how nationalism, social Darwinism, and feminism affected these interpretations. Karen Teoh’s research on the creation of ethnic Chinese female identities in girls’ schools in Malaysia and Singapore reveals the development of complex cultural identities. In sum, contributors will analyze: (1) to what degree Chinese and Westerners assimilated with the other’s cultural and gender constructs, (2) if their interaction led to the creation of cultural hybrids, and (3) in what ways gender, the body, national boundaries, and tradition and modernity became intertwined as Chinese and Westerners applied, tested, and altered gender identities during the Qing and Republican periods.
Cultural and Gender Hybrids? European Religious Celibates in China
Melissa Dale, University of San Francisco
This paper examines Chinese perceptions of the masculinity of Catholic priests serving as “court savants” at the Qing imperial court and how religious vows of celibacy and chastity affected the cultural encounters between China and the West. Celibacy was not a foreign concept to the Qing imperial court. The court was well acquainted with religious celibacy such as that practiced by Buddhist monks and celibacy caused by physical disfigurement in the case of eunuchs. How did the Chinese interpret the celibate lifestyle of Catholic priests in China? Aware that religious vows could be broken, the Chinese questioned whether or not these foreign celibates could be trusted. Were these Catholic priests potential sexual threats to the emperor’s women and the women of China? Although they presented themselves as scholars, a role limited to males, the sexual abstinence of Catholic priests placed them at odds with key indicators of masculinity in China. How did foreign religious celibates negotiate the cultural and gender divide in China? To what extent did they assimilate with Chinese culture in order to gain acceptance? Did they become cultural hybrids in the process? This paper argues that European religious celibates tested the boundaries of Chinese concepts of masculinity during the Qing dynasty.
Letters from China: Chinese Female Converts and their Foreign Missionary
Ji Li, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
In the November of 1870, Société des Missions Etrangeres de Paris, on the rue de Bac, received three letters from China. They are written in Chinese on yellow rice paper by three Chinese female converts from the Tu family: Tu Xiao’er Niu (Colette Tu), Tu Xiao Shiyi (Marie Tu), and Tu Xiao Dazi (Philomene Tu). The letters are addressed to Priest Lin, or, Dominique Maurice Pourquié, who was a MEP missionary in Manchuria from 1847 to 1870. Unfortunately, when the letters arrived in Paris, Pourquié had already passed away for about six months. Unaware of his death, the three faithful Chinese women from the Tu family wrote to describe their miserable lives after Pourquié’s departure and request his return to Manchuria.
Few texts of rural Chinese Catholic women have been preserved. In fact our understanding of Christianity in rural China is limited by the restrictions that prevented the open expression of women’s religious beliefs and relations with their foreign male priests. By closely examining the letters written by the three Chinese women and their French priest Pourquié’s writings on women and conversion, I will investigate foreign missionaries’ place in local Chinese community, and the ways religious languages and values shaped rural Chinese women’s writing and belief. I will also explore how gender relations, family conversion and cross-cultural communication are entangled in rural Northeast China.
New Women in the Contact Zones: American Women's Educational Enterprises in National Revolution Period China
Motoe Sasaki, Johns Hopkins
In the early twentieth-century, the “New Woman” (Xin nüxing) was a transnational phenomenon. In China, the term entered into the lexicon by way of Japan and spread quickly from the late 1910s. This term referred to women who were ‘independent human beings’ and whose subjectivity was not fettered by the ‘feudal’ family system. For such New Women in China, one role model was the New Woman in America. The proposed paper will explore the interactions, on both discursive and practical levels, between the New Women of China and their counterparts in America.
I will focus specifically on the educational enterprises (colleges, nursing and medical schools) which American women established in China to create the New Woman. While during the early 1920s these projects enjoyed some success in China, during the national revolution era they came to face a variety of problems. By focusing on this turbulent period, the paper will discuss the ways in which both American and Chinese interpretations of the New Woman were each implicated in different ways with ideologies like nationalism, popularized social Darwinism, and feminism. Through this critical view of various reactions toward American New Women by both New Women in China and their male counterparts, as well as through an analysis of the shift in views among American women about China and their own role there, this paper will shed light on the changing perceptions between the two countries in relation to gender and national character.
A Girl Without Talent is Therefore Virtuous: Girls' Schools and the Ethnic Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore, 1850s-1940s
Karen May-Shen Teoh, Harvard University
This paper examines female education and the formation of ethnic Chinese female identities in Southeast Asia as a crucial site for the interaction of Chinese and Western cultures. It considers the case of English- and Chinese-language girls’ schools in Malaysia and Singapore, and the girls and women who studied and worked in them. Because of their exposure to new and diverse philosophies about the social, economic and political roles of women, these females developed a unique set of attitudes and identities that sometimes departed from those of their male counterparts.
Established by a wide range of foreign groups - from French Catholic nuns to British Protestant missionaries, from mainland Chinese intellectuals to American Methodists – girls’ schools were a key emerging field for debating whether, how and to what end Chinese girls should be educated. On the one hand, these schools generated new opportunities for activity, interaction, ideas and work beyond domestic limits – an outcome that had not always been intended, but that certainly grew out of Western groups seeking to introduce modernity and civilization through Chinese women as wives, mothers and (sometimes) workers. On the other hand, these schools were frequently conservative institutions operated by patriarchal authorities such as the Catholic Church and Chinese clan associations. As a result, girls in both English and Chinese schools absorbed different and sometimes conflicting gender ideals, leading them to develop complex cultural identities even as they were expected to conform to traditional socio-economic rules in a fixed gender hierarchy.