The emerging lesbian: Female same-sex desire in modern Chinese literature and culture

This dissertation reconstructs the process in which female homoeroticism became a significant object of discussion and contention in the Chinese public arena, paying special attention to the role artistic literature has played in the overall discursive formation. It is the first study to illuminate the transition from traditional to modern Chinese conceptions of female homoeroticism, and the investigation complements previous inquiries into the conceptual and behavioral revolution in gender and sexuality in the Republican period (1912-49). Beginning in the 1910s and 1920s, female homoeroticism broke out of its former negligibility and insignificance in the patriarchal familial organization of traditional China, to become distinctively associated with feminism on the one hand and psycho-biological abnormality on the other. The social significance of Chinese women's same-sex relations, be it positive or negative, has increased in positive relation to Chinese women's overall social, economic and political strength.; Chapter One examines late imperial literati writing, with a focus on Pu Songling's stories of the strange. Preoccupied with segregating and stratifying the sexes, traditional Chinese patriarchy encouraged and relied for its stability on a broad range of female intimacies. However, that permission entailed serious delimitation. Female-female commitment was disallowed unless it either cooperated with male desire or supported the patriarchal cult of female chastity. Chapter Two reconstructs the first modern Chinese taxonomic discourse of "same-sex love" (tongxing lian'ai) with material gleaned from Republican intellectual magazines and medical pamphlets. By investigating the reinvention of the Western category "homosexuality" in the Chinese context, I critique the blindness to gender difference in Foucault's model of discursive paradigm change, as well as suggest that the paradigm shift in discourses on homoeroticism has diverse rather than unitary effects. Chapter Three looks at May Fourth fiction to analyze the cultural anxiety around New Women's same-sex love. Chapter Four finds in Taiwan the first overtly politicized lesbian movement in modernizing Chinese societies. I pinpoint the mutual implication between Taiwanese feminism and lesbian activism, and I read The Crocodile's Journal to illuminate the difficulties and progressive potential of lesbian autobiographical literature in a mass-mediated public sphere.