Masculinity and Femininity in China, 1500-Present

Over the last several decades, there has been a voluminous amount of scholarly literature about the transformation of women and gender, as well as about the reconstruction of Chinese religions in the context of twentieth-century Chinese modernity. The relationship and intersection of these two separated fields, however, remain uncharted territory. This essay is an introduction to three studies which address this lacuna. It places these writings in the existing scholarship on themes related to women, gender, and religion, and outlines the various ways in which they bring together the two hitherto disconnected facets of academic research on women and religion in the study of modern China, with a focus on the period from the 1900s to 1950s. Together they highlight the gender dynamics of the twentieth-century construction of Chinese religions, and forge new gendered understandings of Chinese modernity. Keywords gender – women and religion – superstition – modernity – ethnicity and minority nationalities

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Mao's famous political slogan 'The times have changed, men and women are the same' (时代不同了, 男女都一样) asserted that men and women were equal in political consciousness and physical strength. However, the slogan's seeming emphasis on gender equality misconstrued the concepts of equality and sameness. In-depth interviews with former 'sent-down' youth illustrate how state rhetoric appropriated a discourse of women's equality to silence women and depoliticize gender as a political category. For urban sent-down youth, gender inequality was absent from public discourse, and conflict between the sexes was concealed by a state discourse that constructed class struggle as paramount. Gender as a category was credited with solely political and pragmatic meaning and was utilized as a means for the communist government to achieve its own political and cultural utopia.

in Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China (edited by Deborah Davis and Sara Friedman), 2014

This chapter explores new expectations of marriage from the parents’ perspectives, revealing parental concerns, anxieties, and frustrations about the marriage market in a changing urban environment. Some of our evidence comes from secondary sources and census figures, but most comes from hundreds of hours of fieldwork in the matchmaking corner of Shanghai’s People’s Park from September 2007 through June 2008, with follow-up interviews conducted in 2009. Our fieldwork reveals that parental matchmaking is less a residue or revival of traditional practices and more a response to contemporary demographic and economic pressures and to the parents’ strong connections to the socialist past, albeit re-articulated through the language of market. A focus on parental matchmaking therefore enables us to explore how marriage practices have been influenced by such forces as the intense inter-generational ties created by the one-child policy, the uncertainties of market-oriented economic reforms, ongoing contestation over gender paradigms, and the ideological legacies of a socialist and revolutionary past.

Asian Studies Review, 2008

The Evolution of Chinese Female Sexuality from the Maoist Era to Western-Influenced Contemporary Urbanity, 2010

This article explores the enduring effect of a narrative model known as suku (“speaking bitterness”) in the post-Mao era, and in particular its gendered effect when women adopted it to represent their own lives. Using the oral life-story of a woman who lived through the Mao era as an example, the article explores the ways suku operates as a master script in people’s narratives about their lives. It argues that the adoption of the model in a certain sense resulted in the de-narration of gendered experience, as well as the de-narration of life in the post-Mao era, it further demonstrates that the suku narrative model limited not only the representation of certain experiences but also the construction of gender subjectivity. Furthermore, in the post-Mao era, instead of being the master script, the suku model often has to negotiate with other scripts, being revised, extended, redirected, and in some cases, replaced. One of these encounters, between the suku model and a feminist script, will be examined. The article argues that such encounter has the potential to challenge the master script and to create narrative space for women to narrate their gendered experience, and to construct a self-defined, more adequately articulated gender subjectivity.

Gender & Society, 2005

2007

Starting with Bruce Lee in the 1960s, Chinese martial arts films havebeen gaining increasing importance in Hollywood. Amidst global fascination and the prevalence of male heroes in martial arts films, it is surprising to note that only a few studies engage the genre with issues of Chinese masculinity, and none by investigating how the audience makes sense or use of what they are seeing.Taking martial arts films as the research site, this study is about how Chinesemen negotiate their masculinity in a context where their masculinity is marginal,that is, in a diasporic context. The findings of this research attest to themarginalization and subordination of diasporic Chinese men by two dominantand interlocking discourses in the West, namely that only certain White malecharacteristics would be considered masculine, and that certain Chinese malecharacteristics would be considered neutered or even effeminate. The maleinformants of this study, however, are never entirely marginalized, victimized,and oppressed; they are able to construct alternative, different versions ofmasculinities, by privileging what they can do with their “small bodies,” bydownplaying the sexual and romantic dimensions of masculinity, and byemphasizing the importance of control and discipline. These Chinese men aregarnering creative resources not necessarily by going into “indigenous” sources ofhistorical or literary Chinese culture, as suggested by theorists on Chinesemasculinity. Instead, contemporary transnational popular culture—in this case,Chinese martial arts films—opens up possibilities for them to articulate and construct different masculine ideals.

Oriens Extremus, Special section: "Changing Notions of Childhood and Education in East Asia", 2014

The perceived innocence and vulnerability of children has been a dominant theme in modern conceptualizations of childhood, particularly in the aftermath of the Second World War. A growing number of studies suggest however that a notion of children as capable of violent or even lethal conduct has not altogether vanished from post-World War II public discourse in Western Europe and North America, or indeed elsewhere in the world. China of the “Cultural Revolution’” period (1966–1976) is an illustrative case. The present article examines the portrayal of children as violent actors and the discursive militarization of Chinese childhood in PRC magazines of the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. It seeks to highlight the gendered aspects of the “belligerent child” trope in Chinese children’s media, while noting the distinctive depictions of militant boys and militant girls in the latter part of the Cultural Revolution period. These findings attest to the ambiguous nature of Chinese thinking about children and their capacities in the late Maoist period. They cast doubt on the frequently made argument that Cultural Revolution works produced the overall effect of “gender erasure” or, alternatively, of the extensive “masculinization” of Chinese women and girls. They further highlight the importance of critically examining how the different meanings of “being a girl” were produced, circulated, and, in turn, deployed in public discussions on national collectivity and political conflict in Maoist-era China.

Since the late 1990s, it has been very fashionable for newlywed Chinese couples in big cities to have wedding photos taken in professional photography studios. The studios provide wedding photography packages offering a choice of scenes and costumes representative of different Chinese historical periods and gender roles. In popular studios in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, a middle range price package (RMB 5000 or CAD 700 and more) includes five to eight sets of costumes and corresponding studio settings. Apart from the "must have" Western white dress and black tuxedo, newlywed couples often choose other sets of costumes ranging from ancient Han 2 Chinese traditional wedding clothes to Western-style formal evening wear and pre-revolution Han Chinese everyday costumes.

Fashion Theory-the Journal of Dress Body & Culture, 2001

of Hawai'i Press how national policies to increase mobile phone prices were in the public interest of their city. More work like Harwit's, which uncovers the details of policy implementation at the local level, will go a long way toward explaining the unevenness of telecom development across the country and, of course, contribute to the larger understanding of economic development across regions.