Flowers in the mirror: Vision, gender, and reflections on Chinese modernity.
详细信息
文摘
Through close readings of a variety of Chinese language literary works, combined with a consideration of other cultural artifacts and social practices, this study examines the status of vision in modern Chinese culture, focusing in particular on the interrelation between visual practices and constructions of gender. How is gender envisioned in different eras and different cultures? How is visual perception itself engendered? How is gender difference made visible, or occluded, under different historical circumstances? How are visual and gendered assumptions reproduced and disseminated? In addressing these questions, I single out three specific loci at which these two axes of vision and gender intersect: (1) the relationship between gender performativity and visual appearance; (2) the mutual imbrication of tropes of sexual and visual "reproduction"; and (3) the potential parallels between the circulation of "women/signs" and visual signifiers.;In addressing these issues, this study focuses primarily on three general historical "moments": the late imperial period, the early- to mid-twentieth century, and the contemporary moment. I argue that each of these three moments is characterized by a different dominant visual paradigm: namely, those of "specularity," "spectatorship," and "spectral returns," and I seek to identify the manner in which the "scopic regime" of each era is conditioned by contemporary visual technologies and cultural practices. At the same time, my approach interrogates familiar teleologies of Chinese "modernity" by emphasizing the degree to which visual assumptions and practices are perennially recurring from previous eras.;Thus study contains detailed discussions of selected works by ten nineteenth and twentieth-century authors, including such canonical figures as Li Ruzhen, Lu Xun and Eileen Chang; popular authors such as Wang Shuo, Lillian Lee and Jin Yong; as well as more obscure authors such as Chen Sen, Wuming Shi, Li Yung-p'ing. Collectively, these artists span a stylistic, geographic and temporal continuum which challenges conventional classifications, of "modern Chinese literature." Accordingly, by looking at how each of these authors sees visuality and gender, I attempt at the same time to take another look at the boundaries of the modern Chinese literary canon itself.