Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China
2005; University of Chicago Press; Issue: 53 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1835-8535
Autores Tópico(s)Gender Politics and Representation
ResumoTheorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China, by Kam Louie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. viii + 239 pp. £40.00/US$60.00/ Aus $99.00 (hardcover). In the opening pages of this remarkable book, Kam Louie reminds us that gender categories have become a fundamental topic for analysis in academic and popular discourse. Yet, as Louie argues, the emergence of a critical gender studies has focused almost exclusively on the question of women. In the study of Chinese society, masculinity has been left out, elided and ignored. This book is a sustained attempt to write masculinity back into the study of Chinese society. It is organized around close readings of a wide range of different texts, images and events. The author takes us from the representation of the God of War, Guan Yu, to images of working-class heroes in post-Mao fiction, to the internationalization of film superstars Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Chow Yun Fat. Part of the methodological brilliance of the book resides in the restless, almost nomadic movement across different times and spaces. We observe various constructions of Chinese masculinity in the imperial period and the socialist period, as as in the more recent period of globalization. Nonetheless, as the very title of the book suggests, Kam Louie is not interested in merely providing a laundry list of case studies. He wants to write both with and against the history of Orientalist representations of the orient as a feminized other-penetrated, silenced and possessed, as Edward Said once so famously put it. But Louie also wants to build a theory of Chinese masculinity, to develop paradigms that are primarily Chinese but also Western (p. 3). This highly ambitious project is nothing less than the search for a new theoretical language, built on western methodologies of semiotics and psychoanalytic theory and at the same time based on indigenous theoretical constructs. This new language, in turn, offers up new generalizations about how the multifarious icons and symbols of masculinity have been produced, contested and subverted. Kam Louie's interest in uncovering indigenous theoretical constructs leads him to challenge the usefulness of yin and yang (the Chinese theory of the harmony of opposites) as a means of grasping the complexities of gender relations and sexuality in Chinese society. He begins by pointing out that the reductionist understanding of yang as male and yin as female is only partially accurate, for yin and yang presuppose a kind of sexual vampirism in which the original essences are exchanged, allowing for an expansion of vitality and natural powers. As he explains, since both sexes can be either or both yin and yang, sexual difference is not fully explained by yin-yang theory. Discarding yin and yang is crucial because the potential for interminable interactiveness implicit within yin and yang prohibits gender specificity. Incisive theorizing of masculinity is inhibited by the fluidity of the yin-yang binary because each statement should be equally applied to femininity as well (p. 10). To get out of the Chinese box of yin-yang theory, he seeks to isolate categories that serve as coordinates for maleness only. Specifically, he focuses on the binary opposition between wen, the mental and the civil, and wu, the physical and the martial. The wen-wu binary is the historical and discursive entry point because it always carries with it male sexual specificity. …
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