Here is a convincing reflection that changes our understanding of gender in Maoist culture, esp. for what critics from the 1990s onwards have termed its 'erasure' of gender and sexuality. In particular the strong heroines of the yangbanxi, or 'model works' which dominated the Cultural Revolution period, have been seen as genderless revolutionaries whose images were damaging to women. Drawing on contemporary theories ranging from literary and cultural studies to sociology, this book challenges that established view through detailed semiotic analysis of theatrical systems of the yangbanxi...

This important contribution to the study of early modern Chinese fiction and representation of gender relations focuses on literary representations of the prostitute produced in the Ming and Qing periods. Following her heavily symbolic body, the present work maps this fictional heroine's journey from innocence to sex-work and beyond. This crucial angle allows the author to paint a picture of gender identity, sexuality, and desire that is at once unitary and multi-layered, and that comes to illuminate some of the major themes in the construction of Chinese modernity.

Only recently has the enormous literary output of women writers of the Ming and Qing periods (1368-1911) been rediscovered. Through these valuable texts, we apprehend in ways not possible earlier the complexity of women's experiences in the inner quarters and their varied responses to challenges facing state and society. Writing in many genres, women engaged with topics as varied as war, travel, illness, love, friendship, female heroism, and religion. Drawing on a library of newly digitized resources, this volume's eleven chapters describe, analyze, and theorize these materials. They question...

In Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China, Geng Song and Derek Hird offer an account of Chinese masculinities in media discourse and everyday life, covering masculinities on television, in lifestyle magazines, in cyberspace, at work, at leisure, and at home. No other work covers the forms and practices of men and masculinities in contemporary China so comprehensively. Through carefully exploring the global, regional and local influences on men and representations of men in postmillennial China, Song and Hird show that Chinese masculinity is anything but monolithic. They reveal a...

In Romancing the Internet: Producing and Consuming Chinese Web Romance, Jin Feng examines the evolution of Chinese popular romance on the Internet. She first provides a brief genealogy of Chinese Web literature and Chinese popular romance, and then investigates how large socio-cultural forces have shaped new writing and reading practices and created new subgenres of popular romance in contemporary China. Integrating ethnographic methods into literary and discursive analyses, Feng offers a gendered, audience-oriented study of Chinese popular culture in the age of the Internet.

With the Fujian coast at its center, this book reveals the intellectual, migratory and gendered relationships that tied Fijian to the Chinese imperial domain and to its overseas networks. This Fujian study also offers ways to analyze local histories of late imperial China from a more global perspective. Based on a wide range of sources, such as business contracts, legal documents, women's writings, and folksongs, Migrating Fujianese elucidates China's southeast coast and its migration patterns. Examining this multi-ethnic migrant community through the lens of ethnicity shows the...

The contributors to Wanton Women in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature: Models, Genres, Subversions and Traditions draw attention to wanton woman themes across time as they were portrayed in court history (McMahon), fiction (Stevenson), drama (Lam, Wu), and songs and ballads (Oki, Epstein, McLaren). Looking back, the essays challenge us with views of sexual transgression that are more heterogeneous than modern popular focus on Pan Jinlian would suggest. Central among the many insights to be found is that despite gender performance in Chinese history being overwhelmingly determined by the...

In Remaking Gender and the Family, Sarah Woodland examines the complexities of Chinese-language cinematic remakes. With a particular focus on how changes in representations of gender and the family between two versions of the same film connect with perceived socio-cultural, political and cinematic values within Chinese society, Woodland explores how source texts are reshaped for their new audiences. In this book, she conducts a comparative analysis of two pairs of intercultural and two pairs of intracultural films, each chapter highlighting a different dimension of remakes, and illustrating...

In Engendering the Woman Question, Zhang Yun adopts a new approach to examining the early Chinese women’s periodical press. Rather than seeing this new print and publishing genre as a gendered site coded as either “feminine” or “masculine,” this book approaches it as a mixed-gender public space where both men and women were intellectually active and involved in dynamic interactions to determine the contours of their discursive encounters. Drawing upon a variety of novel textual modes such as polemical essays, historical biography, public speech, and expository essays, this book...