Abstract
Any project that attempts to read transgender meanings into Chinese histories and cultural representations will almost always encounter the following question: How do we “apply” an Euro-American theoretical and social category such as transgender to different national contexts? But even this obsession with the question of applicability assumes the coherence of the exporting term transgender, thereby relegating different forms of “Chinese” gender variance as simply the incomplete faces of an otherwise coherent field of knowledge. This chapter takes as its point of departure the unpredictability and speculative aspects of transgender subjectivities in the process of adaptation across genre, time, and space. I will first give a brief review of recent works in Chinese studies that touch on transgender topics before making the case for a cross-historical methodology that treats transgenderism as a heuristic open signifier.
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Notes
Wu Cuncun, “Beautiful Boys Made up as Beautiful Girls: Antimasculine Taste in Qing China,” in Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan, ed. Kam Louie and Morris Low (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 19–40.
Helen Hok-Sze Leung, “Unsung Heroes: Reading Transgender Subjectivities in Hong Kong Action Cinema” in Masculinities and Hong Kong Cinema, ed. Laikwan Pang and Day Wong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 81–98.
Tze-lan D. Sang, “The Transgender Body in Wang Dulu’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” in Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures, ed. Fran Martin and Larissa Heinrich (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2006), 98–112.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 253–264 and 263.
Han ten Brummelhuis, “Transformations of Transgender: The Case of the Thai Kathoey” in Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys: Male and Female Homosexualities in Contemporary Thailand, ed. Peter A. Jackson and Gerard Sullivan (New York: The Haworth Press, 1999), 124.
Feng Menglong (馮夢龍), Jing Shi Tong Yan (石靖彤欣) [1624] (Hong Kong: Gu dian wen xue chu ban she, 1970), 420–448 and 445. All translations of original Chinese sources in the body of the text are my own unless noted otherwise.
By Sinophone, I meant to track the transformations of the tale and discursive meanings of renyao in different Chinese-speaking and non-Mandarin based communities across time and space in Ming- dynasty China, Republican China, and 1990s Hong Kong and Taiwan. Here, I further develop Shu-mei Shih’s foundational definition of the Sinophone as “a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness” by showing how adaptations of the tale outside the People’s Republic of China change the way we read the “original” Chinese premodern tale. See Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 4.
Tani E. Barlow’s work exemplifies this approach of thinking categories such as “history” and “context” in open, speculative, and future anterior ways. Specifically, she draws on Gayatri Spivak’s use of the term catachresis, which refers to “a concept-metaphor without an adequate referent.” She contends that while it is important to theorize what women had been in modern Chinese history, it is equally important to read their heterogeneous desire for the future and their diverse goals and motivations within their particular time in history, namely to ask the question of “what women will have been.” Barlow writes, “A history written in the future anterior, in other words, would not simply note the existence of a future encoded in every present, but would focus particularly on the capacity of this kind of present imagining to upset the sequence of past-present-future.” See Tani E. Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 16–17 See also Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theorization of History 2 as embodying nonsecular forms of history and human diversity that are “constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1.” History 1, in his study, refers to historicist narration of Western modernity that denies the coevalness of non-Western modernities.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 66.
Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 1.
Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” PMLA 116.1 (January 2001): 173–188 and 174.
Pan Jiangdong (潘江東), Bai She Gu Shi Yan Jiu (百舌故事厭舊) (Taipei: Taiwan xue sheng shu ju, 1981), 3. [Pan Jiangdong, White Snake Story Research Compendium]
Whalen Lai, “From Folklore to Literate Theater: Unpacking Madame White Snake” Asian Folklore Studies 51 (1992): 51–66 and 56.
For a discussion on the ideal of companionate marriage that first fostered in the coastal cities in the Jiangnan region in Ming dynasty, see Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 179–185.
Kwang-Ching Liu and Richard Shek, “Introduction” in Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China, ed. Kwang-Ching Liu and Richard Shek (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 1–25 and 4. Tani E. Barlow has similarly pointed to the discursive and material construction of women as funu who occupy specific protocols according to their subject positions as daughter, mother, etc. in the eighteenth-century China. See Tani E. Barlow, “Theorizing ‘Women,’” in her The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, 37–63.
Charlotte Furth, “Androgynous Males and Deficient Females: Biology and Gender Boundaries in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century China,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 479–497 and 492.
Wenqing Kang, Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900–1950 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 34.
Recently, Howard Chiang revised Wenqing Kang’s emphasis on Republican male same-sex relations as continuing, interacting with, and renewing local indigenous sexual vocabularies in previous Chinese dynastic history through mutual encounter of the Chinese and Western discourses. Instead, Chiang argues that the Republican period, through the uneven translations of Western scientific discourses on psychology and sexology by experts, ushers in a new style of reasoning about homosexuality that has epistemological consequences on both personal and national levels. See Howard Chiang, “Epistemic Modernity and the Emergence of Homosexuality in China,” Gender and History 22.3 (2010): 629–657. For previous scholarship on the translation of Western sexological terminologies from the West, to Japan, and back to China through a translingual model,
see Tzelan D. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 99–126; on how modernizing Chinese elites reacted negatively to this translation of homosexuality and sexology during the Republican period and explained it as “an acquired aberration,”
see Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1995), 145.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 3–35.
For a more in-depth discussion of the different takes on humanism polarized between May Fourth intellectuals who generally viewed Confucian traditions as inhumanity and a neohumanist group, Critical Review, that argued for blending the greatest traditions of Eastern and Western civilizations to reinvent a new humanism that is neo-Confucianist in form, see Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 239–258. Through a slightly different orientation, Shu-mei Shih argues that because of China’s semicolonial condition and the lack of a total colonization by Western and Japanese powers, there emerged a bifurcation in the ways May Fourth intellectuals adopted Western influences. On the one hand Occidentalists such as Lu Xun and Hu Shi generally call for complete Westernization and antitraditionalism, while neohumanists (what Shih calls neotraditionalists) are more cosmopolitan in spirit in their selective reinvention of Chinese local tradition and reception of Western self-critique after World War I in the new humanism of Irving Babbitt.
See Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 157–158. In a not her study that focuses on the persistence of inhumanity and monstrosity in the historical and literary writings of Chinese modernity, David Der-wei Wang argues that the very act of writing history depends paradoxically on the negative accumulation of monstrous memory and inhumane violence.
See David Der-wei Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 187.
Lu Xun, “A Madman’s Diary” (1918), in Lu Xun, The Complete Stories of Lu Xun, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 1–12 and 12.
Zhou Zuoren, “Humane Literature” (1918), in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature 1893–1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 151–161 and 157.
Yu Dafu, “Renyao” (1923) in Yu Dafu (鬱達夫), Dafu Zhong Pian Xiao Shuo Ji (鬱達夫鍾披岸小說吉) (Hong Kong: Zhi ming shu ju, 1950), 580–589.
Judith Butler, “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Trans sexuality,” GLQ 7.4 (2001): 621–636 and 634.
Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 85.
Biddy Martin, “Sexualities Without Genders and Other Queer Utopias” in her Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of Being Lesbian (New York: Routledge, 1996), 71–94 and 73.
For an in-depth study and archive of drag king embodiment and subcultural practices, see Del Lagrace Volcano and Judith “Jack” Halberstam, The Drag King Book (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999).
Li Bihua (李碧華), Qingshe (青蛇) (Hong Kong: Tian di/Cosmo Books, 1986), 2–3.
See Yi-Li Wu, “Ghost Fetuses, False Pregnancies and the Parameters of Medical Uncertainty in Classical Chinese Gynecology,” Nan Nü 4.2 (2002): 170–206 and 185.
Ann L. Huss, “Qingshe: A Story Retold,” Chinese Culture 38 (1997): 75–94 and 90.
Jacob Hale, “Are Lesbian Woman?” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 281–299 and 286.
Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 2.
Sue-Ellen Case, “Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 294–306 and 300.
Wu Cuncun, Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 164.
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 14.
Josephine Ho (何超儀), “T/Po Transgender Blues,” (T/蒲變性藍調) in Trans-Gender (跨性別), ed. Josephine Ho (Taiwan: Center for the Study of Sexualities, National Central University, 2003), 377–384 and 378.
Fran Martin, Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003), 23. Tongzhi means “comrade” and serves as a common identity marker for organizing gay and lesbian communities in transnational Chinese cultures; whereas ku’er (cool kid) and guaitai (strange fetus) are local rearticulations of queer theory that circulate among queer academics and communities in 1990s Taiwan.
Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 221–235 and 231.
For the historical emergence of sex change surgeries in Germany, see Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 21,
and Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008), 39–41. For sensational discussions on the possibility of sex changes in 1930–1950s American popular presses, see Meyerowitz, 14–50, and in Republican Chinese vernacular culture,
see Howard Chiang, “Why Sex Mattered: Science and Visions of Transformation in Modern China” (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2012), Chap. 4. For the emergence of transgender studies in 1990s American academia,
see Susan Stryker, “The Transgender Issue: An Introduction,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 4.2 (1998): 145–158.
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Wong, A.K.H. (2012). Transgenderism as a Heuristic Device: On the Cross-historical and Transnational Adaptations of the Legend of the White Snake . In: Chiang, H. (eds) Transgender China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137082503_5
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