Body Landscape And Urban Configuration Under Male Gaze

In 1930s Shanghai,the emergence of new consumption space gave birth to the two body forms of modern male and female.The Chinese Neo-sensationalist School are the faithful writers of "metropolis" Shanghai during this period,and their novels are based on modern male's encounter with female,presenting modernistic experience through the lust gaze of male as "Flaneur" to different types of female "Other".How to treat such novels,which are based on the encounter and separation of male and female,is an interesting and controversial topic.This paper will take the change of male and female's status in the encounter as the basic framework and clue,focus on the mutual study of texts,images,essays and diaries,excavate materials and lost anonymous articles in newspapers and magazines,make a contrastive analysis with the left-wing metropolis texts,so as to explore how do writers complete the ingenious transition from body writing to metropolitan writing.The paper is divided into four chapters.The first chapter discusses the changes of body shape and sensory mechanism brought by new consumption space,that is,the appearance of modern male who take wandering as their career and modern female who are keen on material consumption.The normalcy of female in the consumption space makes male gazing possible.Then,the paper generalizes two types of modern female:one is "demonized" women and the other is women who are analogous to cars and gypsum,so as to illustrate the double psychology of male towards modernity.The above male experience the appearance of modernity by gazing at modern female's bodies.However,the holy virgins,seemingly traditional but actually a variant of modern female,discussed in the second chapter make them deeply perceive the colonial reality and hierarchical spatial structure under modern appearance.It is a self-construction based on the national anxiety that male simulate the gaze of colonial "Other" to the holy virgin.However,the holy virgin,a mixture of exotic atmosphere and native temperament,is also the product of male's transcultural behavior,and can provide resistance to Orientalism.The third chapter begins with the emphasis of the female's"modernity" in the male gaze,introducing "chockerfahrung" to interpret the connotation of "modernity" experience.Furthermore,it is pointed out that the new vehicles and cameras have transformed male's way of seeing,making the fragmented female body blend with the fragmented metropolitan landscape.so that they construct a feminized city beyond reality.The fourth chapter holds that the ultimate goal of male gaze is to seek the identity of metropolitan subject.However,the reversal of the status of "male/active-female/passive" brought by female's "anti-gaze" makes them turn to the construction of urban fringe.Through concentrated analysis of the periphery areas such as suburbs,docks and factories,the paper points out that suburbs do not constitute a pre-modern space opposite to metropolitan areas,since male's attention to factories,docks and mass movement is not to seek ideological ownership,but only to recognize the mechanical civilization represented by docks and factories.Here,male's addiction to modern female and his yearning for labor movement are unified in the intention to seek pioneer experience and identity as a metropolitan subject,and are two sides of the pursuit of modernity.The multiple changes of male identity and status in the above encounter relationship just deepened their cognition of the internal geography and stratum of urban space,and finally drew a clear and detailed urban map.