This special issue of "positions "deals at once with the concrete and abstract meaning of the word fabrication itself. In the concrete, fabrication refers to actual garments created and worn in a society. In the abstract, it alludes to the social characterizations of class, ethnicity, nationality, and gender attributed to fashion. This special issue explores the self-conscious efforts in cultural China and Japan to exert social position, using body and cloth as the crucial points in the construction of identity, modernity, and imagination.

By focusing on clothing and body practices in East...

This is a collection of original essays which focuses on the causes, meanings and significance of female suicides in Ming and Qing China. It is the first attempt in English-language scholarship to revise earlier views of female self-destruction that had been shaped by the May Fourth Movement and anti-Confucian critiques of Chinese culture, and to consider the matter of female suicide in the wider context of more recent scholarship on women and gender relations in late imperial China. The essays also reveal the world of tensions, conflicting demands and expectations, and a variety of means by...