Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Preface: Does Sex Have a History?
- Introduction: The cloistered lady and the bare stick
- Part I Gender, Sexuality, and the State
- PART II GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND THE BODY
- 4 The body in medicine, art, and sport
- 5 The body adorned, displayed, concealed, and altered
- 6 Abandoning the body: female suicide and female infanticide
- Part III Gender, Sexuality, and the Other
- Permissions
- References
- Index
4 - The body in medicine, art, and sport
from PART II - GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND THE BODY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Preface: Does Sex Have a History?
- Introduction: The cloistered lady and the bare stick
- Part I Gender, Sexuality, and the State
- PART II GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND THE BODY
- 4 The body in medicine, art, and sport
- 5 The body adorned, displayed, concealed, and altered
- 6 Abandoning the body: female suicide and female infanticide
- Part III Gender, Sexuality, and the Other
- Permissions
- References
- Index
Summary
Chinese elite males in the seventeenth century regarded footbinding in three ways: as an expression of Chinese wen civility, as a marker of ethnic boundaries separating Han from Manchu, and as an ornament or embellishment of the body.
Dorothy Ko (1997a:10)
In Chinese art … the typical Chinese rock, with its convoluted, foraminate, complexly textured form, might well stand as a culturally quintessential Chinese body. The classical image of the Western tradition is the Apollo or the Venus. The classical image of the Chinese tradition is the rock.
John Hay (1994:68)
Watching Fen-Ma Liuming in Tokyo…, the audience must first certainly be struck by the incongruity of Fen-Ma Liuming's lovely made-up “feminine” face and long silky black hair with a fully nude “masculine” body. Yet Fen-Ma Liuming is neither homosexual, hermaphrodite, transvestite, nor androgyne. This creature's face and body exude conflicting images of traditional gender categories, blurring the boundaries between “male” and “female.” One of the purposes of this boundary blurring is to provoke questions about the validity of our knowledge of what constitutes gender and delimits a person.
Maranatha Ivanova (1999:203)
Historical views of the body in Chinese medicine and art prefigure the complex bodily images that confounded early Western observers of Chinese culture, challenged the aspirations of modern reformers, and inspire contemporary artists. On the one hand, the decoupling of sexual bodies and sin in China's classical tradition made the unclothed physical body inconsequential, even trivial, as a site of virtue, morality, or beauty. Ideas about sinful bodies – particularly notions of homophobia and heteronormativity – that informed modern sexological discourses raised confusing questions for China's twentieth-century youth. Was it modern to wear shorts to play basketball? Was it modern to scorn homoerotic theater culture? Was it modern to hire nude models in art academies? Embroidered shoes were enticingly beautiful, even elegant, but not so the stunted bare foot. Tight-fitting qipao dresses were supposed to be quintessentially Chinese, but did they have to be slit thigh-high? Settling these confusing questions about the body entailed conflict, but also a good deal of wit and humor, precisely (or, if only) because it was difficult to take nude bodies that seriously. They were not all that important.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History , pp. 83 - 102Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011