Article: Female Images in Modern China(JWH)

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Article in
_JOURNAL OF WOMEN'S HISTORY_
Volume 17, Number 4, 2005
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Title:
Pang, Laikwan.
"Photography, Performance, and the Making of Female Images in Modern China"
Subjects:
Photography of women -- China -- History.
Women -- China -- Identity -- History.
Performing arts -- China -- History.
Abstract:
Carefully examining the photographs of courtesans, Cixi the Empress, and dan
(the male opera performers impersonating female characters) within their
cultural economy in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China, this
article explores the relations between photography as a newly imported leisure
activity and the making of female images within the new order of China's modern
society. Photography's direct replication of reality and its infinite
reproductive capacity characterize the complex relationship between reality and
representation in modern society, and also render a new cultural space for
identity performance. Examining a rich array of issues including prostitution,
cross-dressing, fashion, female deification, and the dynamics between gender
ideology and female agency, this article analyzes the instability of gender
meanings in photographs of women. A coherent pattern of "seeing," or a coherent
modern China, is still in the making.