Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2021. xii, 292 pp. (Illustrations, B&W photos.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 9781478014447.
In the Event of Women is one of those books that makes the reader think hard. Written by a theoretically minded gender historian, its author Tani Barlow presents not only rich historical material but makes an effort to theorize with modern Chinese history. In the introductory chapter, Barlow explains why the key concept, “the event of women,” going beyond Foucault, Joan Scott, and Alan Badiou, can better describe the dialectical relationship between modern material conditions and ideas about the bio-physiological woman. Barlow defines “an event” as “a politically inspired action to install a newly discovered truth” (2), and “the event of women” as “the political determination that in human social existence women are men’s equivalent because physiological sexual reproduction is true” (2). I strongly recommend that the reader revisit the introduction after they have read the substantive chapters. Barlow’s historical analysis clarifies her theoretical considerations.
Chapter 1 lays out the “conditions of thinking” for the emergence of the event of women in modern China. Barlow consciously adopts “conditions” instead of “context” to show that the event of woman was triggered when the circumstances created by treaty-port corporate imperialist commodification made new truths thinkable and actable. Commercial ads reinforced the “modernist sociological truth” (48) of woman as a copartner in a nuclear family and a rightful consumer of household commodities. This truth about women’s physiology and social life differed from the one articulated by feminists such as the anarchist, anti-capitalist He-Yin Zhen.
Chapters 2 and 3 explore, respectively, academic sociology and popular sociological understandings about sexual difference in evolution. In the founding phrase of sociological studies, Barlow focuses on representative Chinese thinkers whose adaptions of Western historical, philosophical, and evolutionary theories naturalized the connection between sexual physiology and stages of human society. This truth assumed women’s central role in social life and the (r)evolutionary necessity of their breakaway from patriarchal traditions. Barlow then expands her survey to vernacular sociology, “a form of scientism, or popular, degraded, aphoristic use of categories like instinct, sexuality, social role, social problem, and so on” (99). Drawing on translated sociological scholarship from Japan, Europe, and US, publications by “social science humanists,” popular magazines, and commercial ads, Barlow illustrates how “social problem” became the lens through which all the pressing concerns were processed. Ideas from diverse origins did not form a coherent narrative but nonetheless reinforced a eugenic history that saw sexual and social reproduction as the essential motor of human development. The May Fourth culture embraced this new truth of women.
Chapter 4 moves into the world of ephemera, commercial ads that registered the truths of women put forward by the social sciences. In a commodified society, consumption supposedly would solve “social problems.” The appeal of female icons in ads was predicated on the physiologically sexualized body and its naturally assigned social roles. This chapter offers detailed analysis of commercial ads, illustrating how the advertising industry operated with a social-scientific thinking and delivered the truth of woman. Chapter 5 connects evolutionary theories and the visual presentation of the psychoanalytical truth of female interiority—a desiring being—in commercial art and ads. The image of the self-gazing woman, though already prevalent in late-imperial art, now participated in the event of women. It naturalized the commodified solution to social problems, as her biological, expressive body—in nudity or in mirror reflection—awaited the (r)evolutionary development that would realize her female humanity.
In chapter 6, Barlow analyzes the violent attacks on Wang Guangmei (PRC leader Liu Shaoqi’s wife) from her main political rival, Jiang Qing (Mao Zedong’s wife) during the Cultural Revolution. Instead of looking at this primarily as an elite political conflict, Barlow argues that the attackers’ focus on Wang’s bodily performance during diplomatic missions—her qipao and pearls—reified the modernist claims about the sexualized, physiological truth of woman and her (r)evolutionary responsibilities to the society.
Overall, Barlow’s historical analysis effectively supports her gender theorizing: “Understanding women not as latent participants in events but as an event as such focuses us on women’s recent origin story and helps peel away gender theory’s wobbly efforts to reconcile the natural and the social” (4). Her endeavours to integrate modern economic history, media analysis, intellectual history, and political history are critical to this theoretical intervention. I encourage scholars in gender and historical studies to step out of their comfort zone and explore this fascinating book.
I feel ambivalent about Barlow’s writing strategy, however. Late in the book, Barlow writes: “So far I have defined the political loosely. The question has never been whether women were victims but rather how emancipation should be engineered” (189). I hesitate to accept how “the political” is implied in the book. Although the phrase “in the event of woman” is meant to keep in sight the political implications of modern cultural, financial, and commercial conditions, its frequent appearance is distracting and sometimes obscures whose political subjectivity and aspirations were at stake. If Barlow intends this to create a critical reading experience, then she is successful. As much as I like this concept, I do find myself pausing frequently to ponder its application.
I wish some original Chinese texts were included, especially because language and translation are important to Barlow’s argumentation. For instance, it was difficult for me to verify her translation of a passage from the Chinese translation of the Japanese scholar Ariga Nagao: “The phenomenon of human society exists in truth, and it compels a rational analysis to fix the meaning of social phenomena, which is why we have sociology” (109). Following the footnote, I looked up the 1902 translation published by Guangzhi shuju as well as the original Japanese text. I could not find “exists in truth.” Given that “truth” is a key word in the book, it would be helpful if we could see which local terms have inspired Barlow’s interpretation.
Ying Zhang
The Ohio State University, Columbus