Making female sexuality in Republican China: Women's bodies in the discourses of hygiene, education, and literature

This work examines the construction of female sexuality in Republican China (1911–1949) by investigating images of women's bodies in texts on hygiene, education, and literature. Discussions of women and female sexuality were a vehicle for displacing (and displaying) social anxieties. This focus on sexuality influenced the codification of body culture, as various politically-charged discourses advocated specific images of the ideal woman. Hygienic texts were an important site for the convergence of nationalism, eugenics, and science, resulting in the medicalization of female sexuality, family life, and parenting—all of which were turned into objects for “scientific” analysis. Texts on fetal education, reproduction, and menstruation use rhetoric that co-opts formerly private spaces (the womb, the household, and the temporal space of childhood) for the nation-race. This hygienic image of the ideal woman prioritized the reproductive body. The ideal woman found in texts discussing body-centered education (sex education, physical education, and hygiene education) echoes this socially-conservative rhetoric. Here, the influence of eugenics is even stronger, constructing a “flawless” woman whose mission is the creation of a flawless body and flawless children. Educational articles posit this ideal in conscious opposition to images of beauty found in pictorial magazines, in popular fiction, and even in the visual material accompanying the articles themselves. The resulting tension between verbal and visual images of women reveals the conflict between coexisting ideas of female sexuality. Literary images of women add two other “ideal women” to this picture: the “new woman” and the “modern girl.” The distinction between these archetypes reveals contrasting attitudes towards modernity and female sexuality, and also reflects the rivalry between the national and the cosmopolitan. Depictions of the modern girl reveal that she is sometimes used by (female) authors to explore female subjectivity and free expression of sexuality. At other times, she is used by (male) authors in the form of a femme fatale, a symbol of male anxiety about female sexuality and the alienation of modernity. All of these images existed in a web of shifting tensions and alliances, creating a complicated picture of female sexuality in Republican China.