Transnational Asian Masculinities. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022. x, 221 pp. (Figures, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$74.00, cloth. ISBN 9789888528745.
Gender studies in the Chinese context have often been reduced to women’s studies, and the “Woman Question” has remained at the centre of existing scholarship in the field. Since the 1990s, a growing number of scholarly works, including those authored by Bret Hinsch, Martin Huang, Kam Louie, Geng Song, Louise Edwards, and Xueping Zhong, have begun to pay more attention to masculinity studies to rectify this imbalance. However, the literature has focused more on shifting manhood models and their crises either in premodern China or contemporary China, with little systematic study of masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the most turbulent historical periods of transition in modern China. Jun Lei’s new book fills this void as the first full-length work focused on intellectual masculinities during the late Qing and the early Republican periods, when the traditional Confucianist gentlemanly ideals were under siege in the wake of China’s national crisis. Engaging in a productive conversation with poststructuralist gender theorists and postcolonial scholarship, the author synthesizes the methodologies of literary criticism, visual analysis, and archival research to carry out a well-executed interdisciplinary study.
This book consists of two parts: part 1 has two chapters that lay the theoretical foundation and provide an overview of the larger historical context for readers to gain a better understanding of the literary and visual texts that are introduced and analyzed in the second half of the book. Part 2 has four chapters that offer critical readings of a wide range of literary and media representations of different types of masculinity (and femininity) from the 1890s to the 1930s, or the period between the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945).
The study of Chinese masculinity and its crisis should not be restricted to an isolated national context. As Tani Barlow has liberated “the event of women” from the constraints of area studies and resituated it in a global history of corporate imperialism and colonial modernity (In the Event of Women, Duke University Press, 2021), Jun Lei also stresses the importance of understanding the evolution of modern Chinese intellectual masculinities in a fast-changing global order and colonial discourse. Keenly aware of an Orientalist Western gaze that projected the image of China as a feminized and racialized crumbling old empire in the global colonial capitalist system, Lu Xun made disparaging comments on Mei Lanfang’s theatrical performance of “male femininity” in the Peking Opera’s tradition of female impersonation that gave “‘improper’ presentations of Chinese masculinities to the Western gaze” (4). Heavily influenced by the colonial logic of Arthur Smith’s book Chinese Characteristics, which viewed educated Chinese men as effeminate “literary fossils,” reform-minded intellectuals such as Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Chen Duxiu urged younger generations to cultivate martial prowess and a militant spirit in order to perform the role of self-strengthening modern citizens who could reassert Chinese men’s masculinity by saving their homeland, plagued with imperialist invasions, economic crises, and sociopolitical turmoil. Seeking to remedy the general trend in masculinities studies that “separates male cultural leaders into their existence as gendered beings” (15), Lei stresses the gender dimension and embodied nature of the “Man Question” and its entanglements with other key factors such as class and race in defining modern Chinese male subjectivities under new sociohistorical circumstances and ideological climate.
Having mapped out the key theoretical explorations in part 1, Lei skillfully interweaves two main thematic threads, the “(re)appropriation of feminine space” and the “brutalization of scholars,” in subsequent chapters in part 2, illustrating how Chinese male intellectuals sought to reformulate and perform modern manhood ideals through translating, appropriating, and negotiating with the hegemonic imperialist and militaristic masculinity from the West. Chapter 3 examines the ways in which Chinese male intellectuals used the tactics of negation and affirmation to counter the negative gender and racial stereotypes of Chinese men as the inferior “yellow race” in the colonial discourses. Chapter 4 discusses the May Fourth generation’s turn to a new model of masculinity. In the wake of the catastrophic World War I, Chinese intellectuals were disillusioned with militaristic masculinity. Instead, drawing upon the Chinese qing discourse and European romantic literature, they took an “inward turn” to construe a sentient “feeling self” as the foundation of male intellectuals’ modern identities. Chapter 5 studies the portrayal of violent male heroes in the New Sensationalist fiction as a textual tactic to reassert urban middle-class masculinity in the semicolonial city of Shanghai. Chapter 6 turns to study the visuals of modern women published in Shanghai-based pictorial magazines. Editors and authors of these magazines were predominantly male. They claimed to follow “scientific standards” to create a visualized vernacular sociology through portraying the images of “female monstrosity” as a print media tactic to mitigate their fear and desire of “degenerating” and “abnormal” modern women’s mobility and sexuality.
Since a wide array of male writers’ and artists’ works on femininity are examined in the book, the author might as well consider adding critical analyses of women writers’ works on manhood that could yield richer insights on the complicated issue of masculinity at the intersection of gender, class, and race. Another important constituent of the fast-evolving cultural landscape of the period was the rise of the politicized aesthetics of labour and its impact on the cultural reconfiguration and body politics of masculinity and femininity. More discussion on such a key historical shift, as testified by the leftist intellectuals’ slogan “Labourers are sacred!” (laogong shensheng) and media products such as Sun Yu’s film Big Road (1934), would have added more depth and strength to the central argument.
Overall, this new book is a timely and important work that makes original contributions to a set of interrelated disciplines including Chinese studies, postcolonial studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Scholars and readers interested in modern Chinese literature and media culture, masculinities and femininities, and colonial modernity will all find this volume highly informative and inspiring.
Hui Faye Xiao
University of Kansas, Lawrence