Whorish Representation

Pornography, Media, and Modernity in Fin-de-siècle Beijing

Bibliographic Data

ID6008049
AuthorsY Yvon Wang (Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume40
Issue4
Pages351-392
Publication date2014-07-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueModern China (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-7004 • E-ISSN: 1552-6836
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0097700413499732
OpenAlexW2047100549
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited47

Using materials from police reports to song chapbooks, this article traces the experience of and discourse about sexually explicit media in late Qing and early Republican Beijing. Although explicit representations of sex and efforts to control them had a long history in China, two new forces converged in this period: ideas about reproductive bodies and technologies of reproducing information. These factors injected unprecedented volatility into the parameters of legitimate sexual representation, allowing them to be truly and widely contested for the first time. Existing Euro-American scholarship takes both the “invention of pornography” and the rise of modernity as peculiarly Western phenomena. Fin-de-siècle Beijing presents a corrective case: the fusion of mass-circulated media and sexuality not only casts a telling light on China in the twentieth century but has also embedded Chinese experiences ever more tightly in a complex ongoing saga of global modernities

Aesthetics · Art · Beijing · China · Human sexuality · Media studies · Modernity · Period (music · Political science · Pornography · Representation (politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law

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