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Figuring Modernity: The New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China
Abstract
This paper examines the cultural figures of the New Woman and the Modern Girl in Republican China (1911-1949). In addition to reflecting the anxieties arising from a changing gender ideology, these contending images reveal anxieties associated with the concept of modernity and the modern nation project. The New Woman represents a positive view of linear modernity and hopes for a strong future China. The Modern Girl manifests in two distinct ways: as a self-absorbed woman searching for subjectivity and as a dangerous femme fatale who devours the urban male. Both of these manifestations reveal deep anxieties over the alienation and loss that accompany modernity. Literary works by Ding Ling, Mao Dun, Shi Zhecun, and others reveal that the figures of the New Woman and the Modern Girl cross political and canonical lines. They can best be distinguished by their use in depicting the hopes, fears, pleasures, and dangers of modernity.
... Sarah Stevens identifies that there are two distinct female cultural figures in Republican China, that of the New Woman and that of the Modern Girl, contending images which reveal anxieties associated with the concept of modernity and the modern national project. 15 Although they were quite different in their ideological representation, pursuing different versions of modernity, both the Shanghai Girl and the New Woman were pioneers, and both helped to articulate the development of the era. In this article I follow both versions of the Shanghai lady, seeing them as different aspects of a multifaceted whole. ...
In the Shanghai of the early twentieth century, rapid population growth and the consequent high density meant that, in much of the city, everyday life was condensed into a small and compact box-shaped row house. These houses were arranged along lanes which were also communities, called lilong. Shanghai’s lilong seem haunted by images of Shanghai ladies. This paper aims to explore the social ecology of the lilong by studying its spatial aspects and asking to what extent they influence and are influenced by the radical and creative character of Shanghai ladies, whether “New Women” or “Modern Girls.” Shanghai ladies’ modern femininity, which was architecturally, socially and historically conditioned, seems to have given them a particular attitude with which to approach the physical world, and which in turn pervaded the atmosphere and identity of the city as a whole.
... Selling and advertising beauty products geared primarily towards female consumers, Shiseidō played an influential role in shaping the visuality of feminine beauty and health, and thus shaped Japanese modern experience in 4 Ibid., 242. 5 Ibid., 240. 6 the interwar era. ...
... 11 In speaking 10 The Modern Girl Around the World Research Group consists of Alys Weinbaum, Lynn E. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Polger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani E. Barlow. 11 Sarah Stevens (2003) has addressed this most directly. From a European perspective, David Pomfret has attempted to pick apart the distinction between "woman" and "girl" as it appeared in French Modern Girl iconography; see Pomfret (2004). ...
Gail Hershatter's presidential address at the March 2012 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) encouraged historians to regard gender as a tool with which one navigates a messy, fragmented historical terrain, rather than an enclosed house in which one can “sit back and enjoy the view from a single well-appointed location.” The paper that follows can be regarded as an enthusiastic endorsement. Gender history has made enormous inroads into mainstream academia; “gender is everywhere in the scholarship.” But, as Hershatter observes, “it is not the self-same thing wherever it is to be found.” Each of the stories she told illustrated a complex landscape of political change that was only partially visible or legible from inside the “house of gender,” hard-won though it has been. “Perhaps,” she commented wryly, “we need to get out of the house.” For Chinese historians, “disquiet in the house of gender” promises to be immensely productive, offering fresh views of the junctures in Chinese history in which large political projects affect changes in the smaller projects of everyday life, to arrive at an expanded notion of political change and a more complex understanding of what the revolution meant for Chinese women.
... It witnessed the rise of a public sphere and mass media. In Shanghai, young women and men congregated around Western-style cinemas, dance halls and coffee shops (Stevens, 2003). If Chinese women had fewer rights than their German counterparts, in Shanghai Chinese women experienced at least some freedom in comparison to their rural sisters. ...
Influencers are a prominent group of content creators and opinion leaders on social media. In China, influencers are referred to as “wanghong” (internet red) or “bozhu” (bloggers), whose practices are deeply interwoven with the development of the digital market economy and the creative and cultural industry. Wanghong is also a gendered profession, notably consisting of young women engaging in discussions of beauty and fashion who manifest postfeminist sensibilities of beauty as personal choice and empowerment, with consumerism serving as a subtext. Taking a transnational perspective on postfeminist media culture, this study examines the multimodal storytelling practices of nine micro- and mid-tier influencers in the beauty and fashion domains on Xiaohongshu (RED), a highly popular Chinese social media platform that remains largely unexplored in digital communication research. Using a small stories approach and social semiotic multimodal analysis, this study shows how storytelling, particularly in the influencers’ discourse practices of OOTD (Outfit of the Day) and product review, imbues beauty with ordinariness and communicability. The results shed light on the construction of Chinese femininities on social media in the post-socialist context on the one hand, and the linguistic-semiotic features of influencer marketing and Electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) on the other hand.
Over the last few years, a growing number of scholars have been analyzing the problematic role of woman’s image in the Republican Shanghai’s flourishing visual culture of the 1920s-1930s (Kuo, 2007) and the active contribution of female artists in its process of modernization (Andrews and Shen, 1999). The analysis of relevant cartoon production offers a challenging starting point to address the problem of women's representation during the 1930s from different angles. More specifically, approaching the life and works of Liang Baibo, one of the first (and few) female cartoonists and illustrators of Republican China , allows for the exploration of “gender refractions” from two complementary perspectives. The former pertains to the representation of the female artist as included in a wider, controversial discourse about the role(s) of women in 1930s Chinese socio-cultural sphere. The latter perspective investigates Liang Baibo’s active contribution in the process of modernization of 1930s visual culture.
This article studies Eileen Chang’s (1920-1995)’s self-translation as a cultural mediation between two worlds. Different from the previous studies which either focus mainly on a single work or interpret from the perspective of Sinophone studies, this article presents a relatively inclusive view of Chang’s self-translation by contrasting her practices in the 1940s with that of the post-1950s, examining the changing Skopos that dictates how she conducted and metamorphosized her self-translations and the paradoxical relationship between her writings and her self-translations. In today’s heterotopic world where cultures converge, intersect, and interact in a multitude of ways and places, Chang’s self-translation and rewriting presents less as a study of the schizophrenically divided world but more as a study of metamorphosis, transition, and hybridity across borders.
This dissertation, titled “Interrogating the Mind of Modernism: Gender, Race, and Modern Cognitive Citizenship,” argues that women authors across racial and ethnic difference experiment with narrative form to undermine dominant cognitive models, not to demonstrate the universal shift towards epistemological doubt often attributed to transatlantic modernist formal innovation. Scholarship in transatlantic modernism contends that the fragmentation and alienation of modernist representation produces and reflects profound historical shifts in the understanding of reliability, truth, and subjectivity. That is, it proposes that the modernist mind found in the work of authors like Woolf and Joyce plays a crucial role in producing postmodern theories of performative, relational, or fluid identities. In this study, I argue that literary works by or about women who in some way navigate complicated racial, ethnic, or migrant identities demonstrate that this shift towards epistemological doubt has different stakes for marginalized people. In a political climate that hinges on an articulation of identity for the achievement of political or economic parity, epistemological uncertainty is a privileged condition and a barrier to sociopolitical equity. While the authors I study undoubtedly reveal the limitations of available systems – the arbitrary nature of borders and categories of identity and cognition – they also depict what it means to live life within relational systems of oppression. My analysis develops through an examination of the interplay between cultural conceptions of gendered modernity in Europe, Mexico, and the United States and the representation of fictional minds in Anglophone literary texts. I contend that each of the writers I examine in depth – Nella Larsen, María Cristina Mena, and Jean Rhys – develop alternative models of the mind, models that both echo and intervene in the liberal individualist conceptions of cognition and autonomy that ground European and American definitions of citizenship. I employ relational analyses to outline a shared investment in undermining the way that women’s minds were constructed as spaces of empowerment and freedom through the naturalization of an exclusionary cognitive model: linear, singular, and individual (not intersubjective, relational, protean, or social), rational (not emotional), and universalizable (not multiple or sociohistorically contingent). Mena, Larsen, and Rhys all use narrative form to critique the hierarchies of cognitive capacities that were mobilized as a means to police marginalized racial groups. Through the use of narrative tools like unreliable narration, stream of consciousness, and narrative revision, they depict the politics of cognitive representation, undermine dominant discursive regimes, and develop a more complex field of mental models. My dissertation indicates the array of strategies women authors used to negotiate circumscribing conceptualizations of whose minds matter, whose stories matter, and why. In representing the limitations of universal models, the texts I study circulate their own theorizations, shift available narratives of belief formation and subjectivity, and suggest a proliferation of diverse constellations of raced and gendered cognition in a cosmopolitan, modern world. The new history I develop in this project constructs a genealogy of shared literary strategies and outlines the political import not just of narrative experimentation but also of the notions of cognition, citizenship, gender, race, and modernity through which those narrative forms emerge.
This paper explores how sexuality and femininity 1 are transferred in the Chinese subtitles of the chick flick, Bridget Jones's Diary (2001). In order to address this question, the article is divided into three main parts. In the first section, a review of how the film is received in the Anglophone and Chinese markets is presented respectively, also including the challenges posted to the subtitlers, e.g. the translation of sexuality and swearing in the discourse of women. The second section offers a theoretical framework that structures the paper, adopting Ernst-August Gutt's (1986) "Relevance Theory" and Anthony Baldry and Paul Thibault's (2006) "Multimodality" to examine how the Chinese subtitles work for primarily the Chinese female audiences. What follows is a detailed analysis of two situational categories of recurrent features (swearing and sexuality) in the Chinese subtilties of this chick flick, specifically proving constructions of feminist ideology. The paper concludes that the Chinese subtitles articulates a relatively moderate version compared to the original explicit sexuality and taboo language. Such moderation reflects an increasingly improved entanglement of feminine identity in a contemporary Chinese context.
This book draws on a wide range of methods-including approaches from literary studies, cultural studies, and urban sociology-to analyse the transformation of Shanghai through rapid growth and widespread urban renewal. Lena Scheen explores the literary imaginings of the city, its past, present, and future, in order to understand the effects of that urban transformation on both the psychological state of Shanghai's citizens and their perception of the spaces they inhabit.
‘Lena Scheen writes a lucid and compelling account of literature written amidst Shanghai’s sweeping transformations from 1990-2010. She evokes lived experiences of the city via literary and cultural analysis informed by field research on influential authors, their texts and their public reception. Shanghai Literary Imaginings is essential reading on turn-of-the-millennium Shanghai literary culture.’
Robin Visser, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
‘Shanghai Literary Imaginings offers significant new insights into contemporary Chinese urban culture from a highly innovative methodological perspective. Its truly disciplinary approach makes Shanghai Literary Imaginings stand out from other books that comment on contemporary Chinese city life.’
Michel Hockx, Director SOAS China Institute, London
Shanghai Literary Imaginings: A City in Transformation is an admirable feat of organization, analysis, translation, and interpretation, bringing to light a large body of work that would otherwise lie buried, at least in the western world of Chinese studies.
Andrew David Field, Director of Study Abroad and Outreach, Duke Kunshan University
This chapter is devoted to studying the filmic and literary works about the love affair. Chinese filmmakers borrowed ideas and techniques from their Hollywood counterparts to represent Huang Huiru as a victimized adolescent girl in the precarious urban milieu. D. W. Griffith’s stereotype of an innocent girl’s falling prey to male desire empowered Chinese intellectuals to call for policing women’s aberrant behaviors. Novels about the elopement fall into the category of “social fiction,” whose writers were committed to exposing the darker side of society and assisting immigrants in drawing up a cognitive map of the labyrinthine cosmopolitan city. I argue that social fiction, structurally and thematically, instilled in its readers the notion that Shanghai was their community for everyday activities despite all sorts of perils and ills. Hence, social fiction writers shared a common ground with left-wing and modernist novelists to imagine the woman as a potential threat to the urban environment.
This essay examines the multivalent political and cultural meanings embedded in the production, design, materiality, and representations of clothing textiles in the Republic of China (1912-1949). Undergoing industrialization and design reform, Republican textiles were an important marker of Chinese modernity and played a prominent role in fashioning new Chinese appearances. At a time when China was going through intense national crises, ideas and discourses on Republican textiles crystalized the inherent paradox between China’s endeavor for modernization in the Western mode and resistance to foreign imperialism.
Post-Mao urban China has witnessed an explosion in popular culture and an unprecedented expansion of public space for women, especially young women, to express themselves openly. In recent years, a new type of cultural revolution has taken place in urban China, triggered in part by the widespread use of the Internet, which adds a significant new dimension to popular culture and provides an immediate and direct means for women’s self-expression and self-representation. Concomitant with the growth of a booming Internet community is the emergence of an unusual array of young female “celebrities” in urban China.
The social role and cultural expression of gender in China today is shaped by the nation’s unique five thousand-year history. The two dominant ideologies in contemporary China remain Confucianism and Communism, the former of which does much to entrench ancient and traditional gender ideologies within the modern social fabric. In the mid-twentieth century, Mao’s regime decreed that women in a Communist state should be equal to men. While Communist doctrine sought to overturn conventional gendered ways of thinking, the societal effects of Communist ideology have in many ways proved somewhat less tenacious than those of Confucianism. Furthermore, the adoption of a market economy has challenged both dominant national ideologies in recent years, and the English classroom, to remain relevant, must contend with this evolution as well.
The literary representation of the Modern Girl in Republican China is one of the most generative questions in modern Chinese studies. This chapter reestablishes the linkages between fictional representation and certain motifs that ran through the cacophonous mass media debate over the Modern Girl during the 1930s-40s. By reestablishing the transgeneric and intermedial linkages, the chapter highlights the public significance of Shanghai modernist writers’ seemingly individualistic psychological obsessions with the Modern Girl. The Modern Girl was a chameleon-like enigma over whose definition intense ideological struggles were waged. Some fiction writers foregrounded how the Modern Girl was stereotyped and even maligned by the mass media, while others depicted her as an unhappy heterosexual. If the Modern Girl was a product of both capitalist consumer culture and a modern heteronormative ideology, Chinese literary depictions of the Modern Girl nevertheless showed up the discontents of both capitalist material culture and modern heterosexual liberation.
In her article "Transnational Socialist Imaginary and the Proletarian Woman in China" Anup Grewal discusses 1930s Shanghai and representations of the proletarian woman in relation to the intellectual New Woman and the fashionable Modern Girl. Grewal considers the concept of the proletarian woman in socialist culture first within the context of a local and global field of contending modernist visions of femininity, class, and the city. Next, Grewal analyses how the figure of the Chinese proletarian woman activates a socialist transnationality through shared formal and narrative innovations of translational leftist literature and cinema. Through her analysis, Grewal suggests how the 1930s Chinese transnational socialist imaginary presents a moment of global modernity based on simultaneity and affinity through political solidarity.
Gail Hershatter's presidential address at the March 2012 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) encouraged historians to regard gender as a tool with which one navigates a messy, fragmented historical terrain, rather than an enclosed house in which one can sit back and enjoy the view from a single well-appointed location. The paper that follows can be regarded as an enthusiastic endorsement. Gender history has made enormous inroads into mainstream academia; gender is everywhere in the scholarship. But, as Hershatter observes, it is not the self-same thing wherever it is to be found. Each of the stories she told illustrated a complex landscape of political change that was only partially visible or legible from inside the house of gender, hard-won though it has been. Perhaps, she commented wryly, we need to get out of the house. For Chinese historians, disquiet in the house of gender promises to be immensely productive, offering fresh views of the junctures in Chinese history in which large political projects affect changes in the smaller projects of everyday life, to arrive at an expanded notion of political change and a more complex understanding of what the revolution meant for Chinese women.
In the mid-1930s, criticisms of modern women's habits, clothing, and hairstyles exploded in the Burmese popular press, showing that “modern fashion” made a man no less virtuous and patriotic but rendered a woman immoral and unpatriotic. This article examines the nature of these criticisms and their motivations, and reveals that the controversy over the dress and comportment of modern women was a complex and multifaceted phenomenon sustained by irreducibly plural interests. It argues that neither the appeal for traditionalism and national sufficiency in the face of multiple modern and colonial temptations, nor the changing tides of Burmese nationalist movements sufficiently explain the preoccupation with modern women's fashion, and suggests that the discourse on modern women needs to be analyzed as stemming from a profound unsettling of existing notions of masculinity and femininity, and its effect on relations between the sexes.
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