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EMERGING LESBIAN: FEMALE SAME-SEX DESIRE IN MODERN CHINA, THE
Comparative Literature, Summer 2004 by Berry, Chris
THE EMERGING LESBIAN: FEMALE SAME-SEX DESIRE IN MODERN CHINA. By Tze-lan D. Sang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xii, 380 p.
The academic literature on same-sex desire in Chinese cultures and societies has been growing, but it is almost exclusively focused on men. In the last year or two, this embarrassing imbalance has begun to be addressed by the appearance of works such as Patricia Sieber's and Fran Martin's collections of lesbian and queer fiction. However, Sang Tzelan's The Emerging Lesbian is the long-awaited foundational study of female same-sex desire in Chinese literature and its cultural contexts. Precise in its choice of texts but broad in its coverage and implications, this is a rich and rewarding book that will occupy center stage for everyone interested in the topic and its ramifications for many years to come.
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Readers should not be misled by the book's subtitle into thinking that The Emerging Lesbian only addresses what is conventionally designated as the "modern" era, i.e. 1911-1949. In fact, Sang's work covers four periods of Chinese history: premodern China, Republican China, China after Mao, and Taiwan after the end of martial law. In each of these sections, her meticulous research provides a solid foundation for her arguments, be they original analyses of literary texts or corrections to existing work. Taken as a whole, The Emerging Lesbian remaps our understanding of Chinese sexual culture in at least two ways. First, it refutes the common impression that while there is much documentary evidence of male same-sex desire throughout Chinese history, Chinese female same-sex desire is almost invisible. second, Sang accomplishes this without falling into the trap of constructing a grand and continuous (as well as ahistorical and Eurocentric) tradition of Chinese lesbianism. Instead, she produces a history whose accuracy and sophistication is marked by disjuncture and incommensurability between different paradigms and apprehensions of different practices in different eras.
Sang's work on premodern China challenges two rather contradictory assumptions about the relative paucity of records from this time concerning Chinese female same-sex desire. On the one hand, Bret Hinsch assumes this paucity means that female same-sex love itself was rare because women had little social freedom to form such bonds. On the other hand, Chou Wah-shan's Utopian nationalist position assumes that the record is sparse because prior to imperialism both male and female same-sex love were highly tolerated in Chinese culture. Sang's examination of literary traces uncovers patterns in the late Ming and Qing periods that suggest that there may be more material to examine than is usually thought and that both Hinsch and Chou may be jumping to conclusions. Sang discovers in literature by men a recurrent fantasy in which female same-sex desire smoothes polygamy when two wives desire each other without being jealous of their husband. However, when this literature represents women who desire each other to the degree that they cannot accept conventional marriage, their only option is death. Among women writers of the Qing, she finds that expressions of emotional attachment among women abound, but sex itself never appears, and compromise consistently leads women to marriage. In other words, while there is more evidence of female same-sex desire than writers following Hinsch's reasoning might expect, this desire is consistently subordinated to the demands of Confucian patriarchy in away that refutes Chou's optimism.
On Republican China, Sang's focus on literature complicates the picture we have from Frank Diköttcr's work on the period, which relies almost entirely on the writings of Chinese sexologists. Sang points out that Dikötter takes what amounts to a Eurocentric position by understanding differences from Western knowledge only as backwardness and misunderstanding. In contrast, Sang notes that the many different terms used to translate the many foreign-language terms for same-sex desire proliferating during this period indicate a lively debate in China in the 1920s and 1930s. This is particularly obvious if one remembers how this debate disappeared during the Maoist era. The common use of the term longxing ai ("same-sex love") is of particular interest to Sang because-in keeping with the general idealization of romantic love prevalent in early twentieth-century China -it emphasizes emotion rather than the earlier exclusively carnal and sensual understanding characterizing male-male eroticism.
Furthermore, Sang argues that, in emphasizing inter-subjectivity rather than individual identity, tongxingai "can be viewed as [part of] an alternative modern discourse on homosexuality rather than as a deformed, deficient, and uninformed version of Western sexology," adding that "the refusal of sexual identity may represent yet another tactic for demanding diversity in a globalizing world" (p. 124). However, Sang also argues that even with the general idealization of egalitarian love during this period female same-sex love was potentially threatening to men: while men wanted to believe their partners had an autonomous sex drive, they worried that it might not be directed to them. This contradictory combination is evidenced in the frequent depiction of female same-sex desire in Republican-era fiction, but also its frequent dismissal and denigration, even in the writings of women authors such as Lu Ym, Ling Shuhua, and Ding Ling.
