Edited by Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao
Reviewed by Chris Berry
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)
Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao, eds., Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2024. Xvii + 379 pp. ISBN: 978-1-032-22729-0 (cloth); 978-1-032-22733-7 (paper); 978-1-003-27394-3 (e-book).
In their introductory essay in the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality, Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao acknowledge that there are already numerous monographs and anthologies in the field. However, they stake a claim for their book as an intervention rather than just a representative round-up of leading work. All the essays are new. Furthermore, although the editors aim for broad coverage, they also have what I see as four corrective interventions. Whereas, they claim, the field has favored the pre-1949 era, they aim to spotlight the contemporary. Whereas the roots of much work in area studies approaches China and Chineseness as a site of difference or even exceptionalism, they highlight work that is transnational in approach, understanding China and Chineseness as constant processes of becoming shaped and responding to transnational flows. In response to the proliferation of work on the peripheral areas of the larger Sinosphere favored by Sinophone scholarship, they center the volume on the People’s Republic of China (PRC). And finally, whereas the balance of existing work has tilted toward the social sciences, they emphasize arts, humanities, and cultural studies approaches, and, in particular, a “queering” approach that moves away from research that assumes fixed gender and sexual identities and toward work that questions them. In this review, I first briefly introduce the contents of this substantial volume of new writing, and then return to address some of the positions staked out by these four interventions.
The handbook consists of five parts: “Theorising Gender and Sexual Histories”; “Transnational Migration and Transcultural Mobility”; “Queer/ing China”; “Shifting Discourses Surrounding Womanhood”; and “Gendered Governance and Contestation in Emerging Cultures and Spaces.” The four chapters in the first part focus in different ways on transformations in thought and practice around gender and sexuality during China’s rapid transformation since the late nineteenth century. Rebecca E. Karl’s “He-Yin Zhen and Anarcho-Feminism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” argues that Zhen was a global leader in thinking about “woman” not as a subjective identity but as the product of unequal social relations, including the gendered commodification of labor under modernity. Louise Edwards analyzes the nude illustrations in Dan Duyu’s 但杜宇 One Hundred Beauties (百美圖) collection in “Nudity and Modernity—New Forms of Gendered Voyeurism in the Art of Dan Duyu.” She demonstrates how Dan designed his illustrations to create a legitimized nudity that distanced such images from licentiousness. In the third chapter, “Gendered Language in Modern Chinese History,” Caroline Jortay traces debates about gendering Chinese language, from the invention of the feminine pronoun to contemporary efforts to re-entrench gender-neutral language. Noting that modern Chinese writers have never been able to take linguistic gender for granted, she argues that the Chinese case has much to contribute to a more globalized and less Eurocentric understanding of language and gender. Finally, in “Patriarchal Problems between Revolution and Reform,” Harriet Evans traces how the “woman problem” (婦女問題) has been handled in the People’s Republic, where an initial emphasis on women’s participation in work has given way not only to market economy consumerism but also to feminist scholarship and activism such as China’s #MeToo movement, though one hampered by heavy state censorship.
Cross-border flows inform all of the chapters in the first part, but they take center stage in part two, “Transnational Migration and Transcultural Mobility.” Mayfair Yang’s chapter, “National Allegory and Media Performativity: Chinese Masculinity in the Context of K-Pop and American Rambo,” analyzes contemporary tensions between the state-endorsed and Hollywood-style machismo of films like Wolf Warrior 2 (战狼2) and the popularity among women of a softer K-Pop-inspired masculinity circulating through the commercial media. Fran Martin’s “Gender, Sexuality and Educational Mobility: Chinese Women Students in Australia” confirms that sustained time overseas promotes individuation from and resistance to PRC gender and sexuality norms. Chapter 7, Liang Luo’s “Gender and Sexuality in the Anglophone White Snake Worlds,” traces how the fluid gender and sexuality narrative of the White Snake legend varies across renditions in the Anglophone literary world in the United Kingdom, the United States, Malaysia, and Singapore. “Prostitution and Human Trafficking” by Tiantian Zheng challenges mainstream conflation of sex work and human trafficking in her research on women who cross into and out of China to engage in prostitution. She argues that for women who engage voluntarily in sex work, the so-called trafficker is often the agent sought out to assist them overcoming the state’s threats to their ambitions. Jamie Coates closes the section by returning to the questions of Chinese masculinity posed by Mayfair Yang’s chapter. Whereas Yang interrogates masculinity inside the PRC, in “Enacting Transnational Masculinity Regimes in the Migrant Context: Chinese Migrants in Japan” Coates examines the practices and beliefs of Chinese male migrants in Japan. He finds that Chinese male migrants in Japan use consumerist cosmopolitanism to claim and display success at the same time as they push back against long-standing stereotypes of Chinese masculinity as soft or weak.
The third and central section of the anthology, “Queer/ing China,” begins with chapter 10, “When Queer Theory Speaks Chinese: Translating Queer Theory in China,” authored by co-editor Hongwei Bao. Bao identifies three episodes: debates around the term tongzhi (同志) and the effort to Sinicize queer theory; the adoption of ku’er (酷兒) in PRC academia after 2000, and the 2012 “Sailor Moon Warrior Lala” online debate between adherents of a homonormative politics and those who espoused an anti-identitarian queer politics. In the process, Bao argues that “Queer theory, as a ‘travelling theory’ (Said 1984), has ceased to be an imported discourse and a Western theory in its international travel to the mainland Chinese context” (166). In “Claustrophobic Sexuality: Mapping Gay Male Urban Subjects and Postmodernity in the Films of Cui Zi’en [崔子恩],” Alvin Wong reads the replacement of the closet with claustrophobia in Old Testament (舊約, 2002) and Feeding Boys, Ayaya (哎呀呀，去哺乳, 2003) as a reframing away from the psychological and toward the social within the context of China’s transition to neoliberal capitalism. Victor Fan counters the separation of theory and practice commonly found in rejections of theory in chapter 12, “Theorising Queer Cinemas,” to argue for queer theorization as an ongoing cinematic project of revealing and undoing the taken-for-granted in cultures. Co-editor Jamie J. Zhao analyzes the responses of Chinese female queer fans of The L Word in “Speaking the ‘L’ Elsewhere: Queering Women in TV in a Global China.” Many of these fans are based in North America and their responses coalesce into a strategic construction of an idea of the West to interrogate their experiences back home in China, making this chapter an excellent companion to Fran Martin’s chapter on Chinese women students in Australia. Finally, continuing the argument for the use of media to imagine alternative gendering and sexuality, Ling Yang and Yanrui Xu’s chapter, “‘Opening the Door to a New World’: Danmei and the Gender Revolution in China,” extends their own earlier work on “fan-led cultural globalization from below.” They examine the history of danmei (耽美) culture in the PRC from its amateur inception to commercialization and, most recently, to the government ban on television adaptations.
The two final essays in the third part (Zhao’s, Yang and Xu’s) could also have been accommodated in the fourth, “Shifting Discourses Surrounding Womanhood.” This part begins with Xin Huang’s chapter 15, “Funü: The Onion Peeling Stories,” in which she reflects on her personal experiences—first of the double burden of living under Maoist women’s liberation, then the question of Chinese female masculinity and how the discourses around it failed to acknowledge queer women, and finally her engagement with European and American feminism and feminist theory’s often “narcissistic” engagement with China. In “Chinese Women-in-Suits,” Talel Bar and Haiqing Yu analyze WeChat articles to understand the vicissitudes of the workplace for Chinese white-collar workers and their efforts to mitigate them through their workwear choices. Chapter 17, Monica Merlin’s “Rethinking Nüxing Yishu in the PRC: The Shifting Discourses around Art by Women from the 1990s to Today,” focuses on the work of Xu Hong 徐虹 and Liao Wen 廖雯 to argue against the perception of Chinese women’s art as depoliticized and to resituate it within a feminist frame. The last chapter in the section is Angie Chau’s “Beyond Cyborg Prostitutes: Fantasies of Womanhood, Translated Chinese SF and Soft Power.” In it, she examines Chinese science fiction translated into English as a form of Chinese soft power and one of the few contemporary cultural genres to reach international audiences, making the way it does (and does not) circulate new images of Chinese women particularly significant.
The final part of the book is “Gendered Governance and Contestation in Emerging Cultures and Spaces.” Chapter 19, “Women as Dancing Wanghong on Douyin: Affective Affordances and Gender Performativity,” by Han Fu, Anthony Fung, and Jindong Leo-Liu, traces how the Douyin store enables monetization of affective performances by women, but also argues that the dances involved go beyond sexuality. Geng Song and Ran Xi likewise emphasize diversity of gendered behaviors in chapter 20, “Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity in Postsocialist China: Grassroots Male Images in Cyperspace.” While acknowledging dominant nationalistic and neoliberal entrepreneurial imagery, they also explore how some men embrace their “loser” status or perform rural bumpkin qualities online. Sheng Zou’s focus in chapter 21 is on masculinity in hip-hop culture. Using psychoanalytic theory, “Sublimated Machismo: Patriarchy, Hegemonic Masculinity and Popular Nationalism in China’s Hip-hop Culture,” he examines how censorship engages with the libidinal drives of the music genre to redirect them toward patriotic masculinity. Finally, in chapter 22, Jinyan Zeng and Xibai Xu give us a sobering portrait of feminist activist Ai Xiaoming’s 艾曉明 gendered strategies for coping with her persecution at the hands of the state: in the face of exclusion from public space, she finds ways to use her domestic space and digital media to continue her work.
This collection provides an excellent resource for anyone wanting to grasp the state of research on gender and sexuality in China today. Each essay functions as an autonomous unit, and to offer a critical response to each would be impossible in the space of this review. However, the overall quality is high, and I am confident that many of the chapters will quickly find their way onto various course syllabi. The book also has the potential to be used as a set text for a course on the topic. But how would the volume’s interventions to redress perceived imbalances in the field[s] configure such a course? Would supplementary materials be needed to round it out?
First, there is the focus on arts and humanities scholarship in the context of what we might call the cultural turn and the even more recent mediatic turn. This does not mean there is an absence of social sciences scholarship. Fran Martin, Tiantian Zheng, and Jamie Coates’s chapters in the second part are all interview-based ethnographies, as is Jamie J. Zhao’s in the third section. But more empirical and positivist social science work that takes identity categories for granted and works with statistics is not included. A key element of the cultural turn has been questioning those taken-for-granted categories in both gender and queer studies. The mediatic turn has emphasized that all knowledge is mediatized. In these circumstances, the omission of empirical and positivist work seems both appropriate and current, but I must acknowledge that my own disciplinary background predisposes me to favor this scholarly direction.
Second, the handbook has no material dealing with pre-modern China, if the modern era is defined as beginning with the Opium War. (Of course, many scholars push the date back much earlier.) Given the vastness and complexity of China’s thousands of years of recorded history, the need to bracket off a timeframe even for a large handbook such as this is completely understandable. To their credit, although the editors have focused on the contemporary, they have also included material going back as far as the nineteenth century. But there are many debates about how Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist thinking about gender and sexuality might either confine and oppress or provide liberating alternatives even today, as well as research on various historical Chinese gender and sexuality cultures and practices. A section of such chapters would surely be a high priority for any expanded version of the handbook.
There are two other interventions the editors have made: focusing on the PRC and emphasizing transborder flows. It is indeed striking that a handbook of Chinese gender and sexuality makes so little mention of Taiwan that “Taiwan” does not even appear in the index. I noticed a couple of points where it crops up in essays. Hongwei Bao remarks in one sentence (p. 170) that “queer” was translated as ku’er in Taiwan in the 1990s, well before Li Yinhe’s 李銀河 PRC translation in 2000. And, at the beginning of Alvin Wong’s essay on Cui Zi’en’s films (181), he notes that Hong Kong’s Yonfan 楊凡 and Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang 蔡明亮 also engage with claustrophobia and perverse spatial remapping. It is at moments like these that the reader catches a glimpse of what the decision to exclude the larger Sinosphere, including the Chinese cultural world beyond the current territory ruled by the PRC, has framed out. These two essays point toward the alternative framings that might have been produced by the inclusion of Taiwan. As for the other essays, only a highly informed and active reader would have the knowledge to make such connections.
And yet, although this absence of Taiwan is troubling, in today’s political world with its reinvigorated nationalisms, to include Taiwan would also be problematic. It is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. For every reader offended by the absence of Taiwan there is another one who would insist that “Taiwan is not China” and that any research on gender and sexuality in Taiwan should not be included in a book on “Chinese” gender and sexuality. Other areas of the Sinosphere outside the PRC also receive little attention. For example, Malaysia and Singapore only appear in Liang Luo’s chapter on translations of the White Snake legend into English.
Another significant omission in the volume is reference to China’s non-Han populations. Although the editors have chosen to focus on the PRC, the essays they have chosen largely overlook the other fifty-five nationalities making up the PRC’s self-proclaimed multiethnic zhonghua mix. Has the handbook’s limited territorial focus on the PRC accepted an equally narrow ethnic definition of Chineseness as well? Among the volume’s few mentions of non-Han phenomena are the Tibetan internet sensation Tenzing Tsonbu, who is analyzed as an example of curated ethnic masculinity in Geng Song and Ran Xi’s chapter. But, despite the importance in the PRC mediascape of stereotypes about the “macho” qualities of northern ethnic groups such as the Mongolians, or the fascination with the matrilineal Mosuo cultures, neither these ethnicities nor any others feature anywhere in the volume.
Again, it must be acknowledged that a much larger handbook or even a multi-volume work would be needed to cover not only a longer historical timeframe but also a larger territorial and ethnic scope. But focusing on the contemporary PRC and only the Han Chinese risks perpetuating an implicit ethno-nationalism. Here is where the editors’ decision to also focus on transborder flows as one of their interventions plays a significant counter role. Most of the chapters in the handbook trace how gender and sexuality in China are dynamic categories shaped by transborder flows in and out of the PRC. In this way, the focus on the transborder proves to be particularly astute, because emphasizing the globally connected qualities of gender and sexuality in China as multiple and ever-changing forecloses upon essentialism and binary thinking and prevents any slide into ethno-nationalism.
Taken as a whole, The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality walks nimbly through a number of minefields that all researchers working in Chinese Studies face. The editors’ and author’s choices do indeed highlight current directions in work on Chinese gender and sexuality as well as helping to rectify imbalances. Those choices also enable them to achieve a focus within the confines of a single volume. Inevitably, certain important aspects of a more historically, territorially, and culturally broad conception of China and Chineseness have had to be left out. But the result is still a lively collection that will satisfy a wide readership, stimulate debate, and enrich thinking for years to come.
Chris Berry
King’s College London