China Information current issue

Gendering China Studies: Peripheral Perspectives, Central Questions

De Kloet, J. — 2008-06-26

This article explores the connections between the field of China studies and the field of gender and sexuality studies. It engages with three questions. First, why is it that theoretical, conceptual and methodological cross-fertilization between China studies and cultural studies remains quite scarce? Second, why are popular culture and art important domains of academic inquiry? Third, why is it crucial to theorize and problematize "Chineseness"? Drawing on the debates surrounding the translation of alleged "Western" theories related to the sex—gender distinction, feminism, and queer studies to a "Chinese" context, it is argued that the call for local knowledges runs the danger of becoming an essentializing, hegemonic discourse on its own. The article concludes with a plea for an interdisciplinary approach that combines theoretical and empirical insights from area studies and cultural studies, and an intersectional take in which gender is analyzed in conjunction with other parameters of difference, such as ethnicity, class or age, and, finally, a multisited, comparative research agenda as to avoid a sino-centric or Han-centric analysis. This may help to identify, understand, and hopefully resist the seduction of both cultural essentialism and cultural relativism.

Sexuality, Domesticity, and Citizenship in the Chinese Media: Man's Needs, Maid's Rights

Wanning Sun, — 2008-06-26

The widespread phenomenon of outsourcing domestic work has profoundly altered the household life styles of urban families and reworked the division of labor at home. However, the extent to which urban consumers depend on the labor and service provided by the rural migrant women is by no means indicative of the degree of "harmony" and civility between the two groups. While the Chinese news media, with its urban and middle-class clientele base, see little chance of selling pictures or headlines featuring the everyday struggles of disenfranchised social groups such as rural migrant women who are employed as domestic workers, they have exercised unprecedented freedom in publishing stories about criminality and sexuality. With the figure of the maid becoming increasingly ubiquitous in urban households, urban consumers of paid domestic work also get a regular dose of "maid stories" in their everyday media consumption. Combining ethnography with detailed media analyses, this article examines the range of gendered positions and modes of sexual subjectivity which have been articulated in these stories. It shows that in a number ways the emergence of a new sexual sensibility for urban, middle-class men is contingent on the exclusion of subject positions for, and the derogation of, the "other" woman—the "intimate stranger" at home.

Hong Kong and the Production of Art in the Post/colonial City

Cartier, C. — 2008-06-26

Contemporary and alternative art in Hong Kong has strong local roots and translocal connections, and while it reflects cultural politics in the city it lacks substantial international recognition. This interdisciplinary analysis focuses on the contexts of production of contemporary art by women in Hong Kong and their centrality in the city's arts community. The narrative contrasts the presence of contemporary and alternative arts and its absence from art criticism discourses through the disjuncture between the geopolitics of contemporary Asian art and the making of Hong Kong into an unprecedented territorial formation. Reading local art through alternative space–time concepts and intersubjective arts practice is proposed through the exhibit-event, "If Hong Kong, A Woman/Traveller."

The Genrification of "Korean Drama" in Taiwan

Yang, F.-c. I. — 2008-06-26

This article demonstrates that the process of defining Korean drama as idol drama or Qiongyao drama with realist or melodramatic orientations by different agents for "self-aggrandizement" is embedded in gender and ethnic/class tensions as a result of postcolonial nation formation and globalization. The profit motive underscores the definition of Korean drama as idol drama, which is articulated through discourses of modernization, gender, nation building/Chinese hegemony, and globalization. The culture industry's invocation of "cultural proximity" enables a definition of Korean drama as Qiongyao drama with realist or melodramatic orientations. Gender politics is central to this process as it depends on and, hence, reinforces the gender hierarchy which privileges realism over melodrama. The genrification of Korean drama relies on the construction of indigenous drama (and rural obason) as the Other. The different meanings that are attached to this Other by the "nationalistic" scholars/critics, audience/critics, and fans/critics are predicated upon an evaluation hierarchy which privileges Chinese hegemony, neoliberal globalization, and masculinity. This hierarchy, however, is the legacy of Taiwan's nation formation which works to subordinate the Minnanspeaking rural women culturally.

Gay Sexuality in Singaporean Chinese Popular Culture: Where Have All the Boys Gone?

Chan, K. — 2008-06-26

In offering a selective survey of gay sexuality in Singaporean Chinese popular culture, particularly television, film, and theater, this article examines how the notion of the liminal functions as an effective critical trope to engage with a shifting presence/absence materiality of gayness in these representations. It also argues that this presence/absence is a consequence of the concentrically circular hierarchy of cultural production and consumption created by the Singapore media censorship model. The contradictions embedded in censorship practices and gay cultural representations ultimately emerge out of Singapore's desire to present itself as a culturally open and vibrant society in its bid to be part of the global capitalist network, while the country continues to hold onto its archaic antisodomy laws inherited from the British Indian Penal Code.

Martial Arts Films and Dutch-Chinese Masculinities: Smaller Is Better

Yiu Fai Chow, — 2008-06-26

Starting with Bruce Lee in the 1960s, Chinese martial arts films have been 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 Chinese men negotiate their masculinity in a context where their masculinity is marginal, that is, in a diasporic context. The findings of this research attest to the marginalization and subordination of diasporic Chinese men by two dominant and interlocking discourses in the West, namely that only certain White male characteristics would be considered masculine, and that certain Chinese male characteristics would be considered neutered or even effeminate. The male informants of this study, however, are never entirely marginalized, victimized, and oppressed; they are able to construct alternative, different versions of masculinities, by privileging what they can do with their "small bodies," by downplaying the sexual and romantic dimensions of masculinity, and by emphasizing the importance of control and discipline. These Chinese men are garnering creative resources not necessarily by going into "indigenous" sources of historical or literary Chinese culture, as suggested by theorists on Chinese masculinity. Instead, contemporary transnational popular culture—in this case, Chinese martial arts films—opens up possibilities for them to articulate and construct different masculine ideals.

Sexed Bodies, Sexualized Identities, and the Limits of Gender

Evans, H. — 2008-06-26

Sex is one of the dominant metaphors of China's postmillennial consumerist modernity. Public media and private discussions map endless pleasures and possibilities onto sexed bodies, foregrounding sexuality as an increasingly significant component of individual identity. Yet, as argued in this article, the diversity of sexual representations masks the discursive operation of the sexed body in consolidating individual accommodation with the consumer market and in "neutralizing" the exploratory and pluralist meanings of contemporary sexual culture. Inheriting a recent ideological history in which sexuality was not a significant component of public discussions about gender relationships, and in an ideological context bridging local and global interests that limit the interrogation of gender as a critical category of enquiry and organization, sex and the sexed body emerge in mainstream discourse as a collection of acts, responsibilities, and choices dissociated from the broad social issues of gender hierarchy and injustice.