When Clothes Matter: Women, Tastes and Audiences in 1890s Shanghai Print Media

Abstract

Recent scholarship on modern China demonstrates how women’s bodies and imageries were staged as spectacles and became the vehicle for imagining the meanings of modernity. Revisiting this theme, our panel centers on the presentation and reception of gendered and sexualized spectacles in China between 1890s and 1930s. We aim to question how “spectacle” was understood -- and misunderstood -- by interrogating the linkages among the spectacles, their producers, and the audience. The roles of producer and audience might overlap, but our survey of responses to spectacle -- from government officials, elite connoisseurs, physicians to cartoonists -- also points to vast differences between authorial, ideological positions and representations and how these were seen and interpreted. By studying this multidirectional, uneven interplay, our papers challenge the simplified notion of a society overwhelmed by the spectacles of power and commercial culture.

Fong-fong Chen explores the images of women in late Qing Shanghai, with special attention to the impact of women’s dress on audience’s perceptions of social and cultural identities. Jiacheng Liu investigates how Beijing opera actresses took early Republican Beijing by storm, becoming objects of multiple modes of seeing in an emerging society of spectacle yet also returning the gaze, to their own strategic advantage. Roanna Cheung examines the discourses surrounding the spectacle of sexual health advertising in 1920s and 1930s Guangzhou to highlight the uneasy struggles over the meanings of hygiene, public morality, cosmopolitan modernity, and nationalism in local society. Lisa Claypool and Andrew Field will act as discussants.