Abstract
This chapter focuses on two overlapping issues while discussing the development of the feminine ideals in China. The first focus is on how this development can be understood within the particular historical and cultural contexts in China and how it is related to factors such as economic and political situations. The second focus is with man as the speaking subject in the Chinese patriarchal system, how male imaginations (especially those represented by the literati and later the party leaders) construct the feminine ideals as the projection of their wishes, regrets and the various forms of their fantasies. The discussion includes philosophical discourses of female beauty in the Chinese traditions, follow with the case of the courtesan culture in late Imperial China, in which the female beauty notion is redefined and represented by male literati under drastic political and economic changes. The chapter then reviews revolutionary revisions in the representation of female ideals under the Communist ruling, and concludes with the contemporary notion of female beauty in the new Socialist China, a notion that has departed from its national party discourses to follow the capitalist globalization.
This article comes from the body of the publication, “Beauty and the State: Female Bodies as State Apparatus and Recent Beauty Discourses in China,” in Beauty Unlimited, edited by Peg Brand, pp. 368–384. Copyright year in 2003, Copyright holder Indiana University Press in Bloomington & Indianapolis. The major part is reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press.
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Notes
- 1.
Chinese source from “Yu-fang Chih-yao” (“Essentials of the Jade Chamber”) in Te-hui Yeh, Shuang-mei ching-an ts’ung-shu (Shadow of the double plum tree collection), (Changsha, 1903), trans. in Wile, 100.
- 2.
Chinese source from “Yu-fang pi-chueh” (“Secrets of the Jade Chamber”) in Yeh, 1903, trans. in Wile 1992, 106.
- 3.
Chinese source from “Yu-fang pi-chueh” (“Secrets of the Jade Chamber”) in Yeh, 1903, trans. in Wile 1992, 106, n.61.
- 4.
Chinese source from “Yu-fang pi-chueh” (“Secrets of the Jade Chamber”) in Yeh, 1903, trans. in Wile 1992, 106.
- 5.
Hsi-hsien Teng, “Tzu-chin kuang-yao ta-hsien hsiu-chen yen-i” (Exposition of cultivating the essence by the Great Immortal of the Purple Gold Splendor), in R. H.Van Gulik, Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period, trans. in Wile 1992, 137.
- 6.
Chinese source from “Su Nu miao lun” (The Wonderous Discourse of Su Nu), trans. in Wile 1992, 128.
- 7.
Wu Hung, “Beyond Stereotypes: The Twelve Beauties in Qing Court Art and the Dreams of the Red Chamber” in Widmer and Chang 1997, 306–365.
- 8.
See Wu’s analysis of Wei Yong’s literary work “Delight in Adornment” (fl. 1643–54), in Widmer and Chang 1997, 325–6.
- 9.
Gao quotes Article 4 issued by the national government on the movement which states, “all customs that hinder the regular physical growth of young men and young women should be strictly prohibited by the countries, municipalities, villages and hamlet; and their programmes should be fixed by the Department of Education and the Training Commissioner’s Department.” Although this clause was primarily directed at the prevalent rural customs of breast-binding and foot-binding, it was instrumentalized in quite other ways. Gao 2007, 117–118.
- 10.
Information from http://chineseposters.net/themes/dazhai.php, retrieved on Feb 19, 2015.
- 11.
Both “The White-Haired Girl” (Bai Maonu, 1965) and “The Red Detachment of Women” (Hongse Niangzi Jun, 1964) were national standard ballet repertoires after the founding of PRC in 1949. Both have successfully promoted the socialist agenda of class struggles and political correctness. “The White-Haired Girl” was premiered by the Shanghai Dance Academy in 1965; the eight-act ballet is an adaptation of the Chinese opera of the name that premiered in 1945. It tells of a peasant girl, Xi’er, whose father is beaten to death by the local despotic landlord because he is unable to pay his debts. She is taken by force to work in the landlord’s home and she finally escapes into the mountain forest. Her fiancé joins the Eighth Route Army and returns 3 years later to liberate the village and rescue the girl. By then, Xi’er has endured such suffering that her long black hair turns white. “The Red Detachment of Women” was produced by the Central Ballet of China in 1964. The six-act ballet deals with a Communist-led company of women on Hainan Island during the civil war in the early 1930s. It shows the liberation of a peasant slave girl, who becomes a member of the Communist Party and finally the leader of the company.
- 12.
See my previous study, “Female Bodily Aesthetics and Their Early Revelations in the Book of Songs” (Man 2012).
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Man, E.K.W. (2017). Female Bodies in China: Literati Fantasies, Iron Girls and Olympics Hoopla. In: Higgins, K., Maira, S., Sikka, S. (eds) Artistic Visions and the Promise of Beauty. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43893-1_8
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