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Gender Trouble's Afterlife in Chinese Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2020

Gail Hershatter Open the ORCID record for Gail Hershatter [Opens in a new window]
Gail Hershatter*
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Gail Hershatter (gbhers@ucsc.edu) is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Extract

As anyone who has written a book can tell you, when you finally finish wrestling with it and it is confined between covers, or tucked away in e-book form, it goes on to have an afterlife, sometimes quite a complicated one, which the author may glimpse only in intermittent and fragmentary form. An original and provocative book such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble will travel to places its author never anticipated and become embroiled in conversations the author may not overhear. A book's influence on another field far from its point of origin is not best assessed by a citation index—though Gender Trouble's numbers are massive. To take the measure of the work that Gender Trouble has done for scholars working in Asian studies (itself a constructed and constantly morphing category, like gender), we should ask how the book traveled. Which pieces were taken up by scholars of Asia, and what conversations and challenges did the book enable, not as a blueprint but as an incubator of locally grounded thinking? How has it been adapted, pruned down to one or two insights, or expanded into new domains?

Keywords

Asian studiesChinafeminismgenderhistoryJudith Butlerperformativitysexuality
Type
Forum—Revisiting Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Reflections and Critiques from Asian Studies
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 79 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 911 - 926
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Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2020

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References

1 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), xGoogle Scholar. A second edition of Gender Trouble was published in 1999, containing an additional updated preface by the author. All citations here refer to the 1990 edition.

2 Butler, Gender Trouble, 5.

3 Butler, Gender Trouble, 16.

4 Butler, Gender Trouble, 8.

5 Butler, Gender Trouble, 17.

6 Butler, Gender Trouble, 33.

7 Butler, Gender Trouble, 50.

8 Butler, Gender Trouble, 67.

9 Butler, Gender Trouble, 65, 72–77.

10 Butler, Gender Trouble, 92, 96.

11 Butler, Gender Trouble, 109.

12 Butler, Gender Trouble, 110.

13 Butler, Gender Trouble, 129.

14 Butler, Gender Trouble, 134.

15 Butler, Gender Trouble, xii.

16 Butler, Gender Trouble, 136, 139.

17 Butler's succinct definition of genealogy: “Genealogy investigates the political stake in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin” (Gender Trouble, x–xi).

18 As Maram Epstein notes, “Histories of embodied and affective selves as part of mundane events and systems of beliefs and practices unfold according to rhythms and timeframes quite distinct from that of the state.” Epstein, Maram, “Rewriting Sexual Ideals in Yesou puyan,” in Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures, eds. Martin, Fran and Heinrich, Larissa (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006), 74Google Scholar.

19 Butler, Gender Trouble, 145.

20 Butler, Gender Trouble, cited in Tani E. Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 37.

21 For the ways in which Barlow makes use of Butler's insights on the constitution of gender through performative repetition, and on gender as an open and resignifiable category, see Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism, 380n41, 391n47.

22 See also Barlow, Tani E., ed., Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 4n4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Tani E. Barlow, “Theorizing Woman: Funü, Guojia, Jiating (Chinese Woman, Chinese State, Chinese Family),” in Body, Subject and Power in China, eds. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 253–89.

24 For other discussions of this essay, see Fran Martin and Larissa Heinrich, Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006), 8; Gail Hershatter, Women in China's Long Twentieth Century (Berkeley: Global, Area, and International Archive, 2007), 90.

25 Tani E. Barlow, “Politics and Protocols of Funü: (Un)Making National Woman,” in Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State, eds. Christina K. Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 339–59.

26 Joan Judge, Republican Lens: Everyday Knowledge, Gender, and the Periodical Press in Early-Twentieth Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Martin and Heinrich, Embodied Modernities, 8.

27 Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 79.

28 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

29 Rofel, Other Modernities, 298n19.

30 Butler, Gender Trouble, 36.

31 Butler, Gender Trouble, 36.

32 Butler, Gender Trouble, 36.

33 Harriet Evans, “Defining Difference: The ‘Scientific’ Construction of Sexuality and Gender in the People's Republic of China,” Signs 20, no. 2 (1995): 357–94; Harriet Evans, Women and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997); Harriet Evans, “The Language of Liberation: Gender and Jiefang in Early Chinese Communist Party Discourse,” in Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches, ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (New York: Routledge, 2003), 193–220; Tina Mai Chen, “Female Icons, Feminist Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric and Women's Agency in 1950s China,” Gender & History 15, no. 2 (2003): 268–95; Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past (Berkeley: University of California, 2011).

34 Harriet Evans, The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

35 Evans, The Subject of Gender, 15.

36 Evans, The Subject of Gender, 5, 35n37, 35n39, 177, 202.

37 Evans, The Subject of Gender, 202.

38 Evans, The Subject of Gender, 202. In another register, Lingzhen Wang draws upon Butler's 1997 discussion of the psychic life of power to analyze women's guilt and subject formation in mother-child relationships, as portrayed Chinese fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 26, cited in Lingzhen Wang, Personal Matters: Women's Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 79, 221m58; Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 12, cited in Wang, Personal Matters, 105.

39 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).

40 Lydia He Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 10.

41 Butler, Undoing Gender, 186, cited in Liu, Karl, and Ko, The Birth of Chinese Feminism, 21.

42 Liu, Karl, and Ko, The Birth of Chinese Feminism, 21–22.

43 Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow, eds., Body, Subject and Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

44 This summary is drawn from a later work; see Martin and Heinrich, Embodied Modernities, 7.

45 Angela Zito, “Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries,” in Zito and Barlow, Body, Subject and Power in China, 127n33. See also Angela Zito, “Ritualizing Li: Implications for Studying Power and Gender,” positions: east asia cultures critique 1, no. 2 (1993): 321–48; Angela Zito, Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/performance in Eighteenth-century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 261n3.

46 Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 12.

47 Furth, A Flourishing Yin, 12–14 and passim.

48 Matthew Kohrman, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 10.

49 Kohrman, Bodies of Difference, 122–24, 236n2.

50 Martin and Heinrich, Embodied Modernities, 11.

51 Epstein, “Rewriting Sexual Ideals in Yesou puyan,” 62. Epstein builds on arguments in her earlier work that “biology was not foundational to traditional views of gender” and that “gender and even the materiality of the body were informed by yin-yang symbolism” in which no absolute boundaries distinguished masculine from feminine (62). Bodies could even move through naturally occurring sex changes (63); on this point, see also Charlotte Furth, “Androgynous Males and Deficient Females: Biology and Gender Boundaries in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century China,” Late Imperial China 9, no. 2 (1988): 1–31.

52 See Tze-lan Deborah Sang, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Jing Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005); Peter J. Carroll, “‘A Problem of Glands and Secretions’: Female Criminality, Murder, and Sexuality in Republican China,” in Sexuality in China: Histories of Power and Pleasure, ed. Howard Chiang (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 99–124.

53 Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism; Tsu, Failure, Nationalism, and Literature; Hiroko Sakamoto, “The Cult of ‘Love and Eugenics’ in May Fourth Movement Discourse,” positions: east asia cultures critique 12, no. 2 (2004): 329–76.

54 Evans, Women and Sexuality in China, chap. 2.

55 Butler, Gender Trouble, 106–11.

56 Dorothy Ko, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

57 Angela Zito writes, “The organs that were the object of fixation for European gender distinction (the penis, the womb, the breasts) lacked a similar discursive weight and reality in China. Instead, and as a pronounced marker of gender distinction, Chinese women engaged in a process of continual physical transformation, molding a visible part of the body (which was then, of course, wrapped in shoes almost never removed in the sight of another).” She goes on to ask, “How must encountering this process have affected non-Chinese women who believed implicitly that gender distinctions rested naturally in original endowments of genitalia and breasts?” Angela Zito, “Bound to Be Represented: Theorizing/Fetishizing Footbinding,” in Martin and Heinrich, Embodied Modernities 31–32).

58 Zito, “Bound to Be Represented”; Angela Zito, “Secularizing the Pain of Footbinding in China: Missionary and Medical Stagings of the Universal Body,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75, no. 1 (2007): 1–24.

59 On footbinding as bodily practice, see also Wang Ping, Aching For Beauty: Footbinding in China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). For the era well before footbinding, Robin Wang uses Butler's historicization of sex as well as gender to argue for a “concrete and situational” approach to the concepts of yin and yang and to criticize the Han dynasty thinker Dong Zhongshu for regarding them as fixed categories in which women ranked below men in a “rigid gender hierarchy.” Robin Wang, “Dong Zhongshu's Transformation of ‘Yin-Yang’ Theory and Contesting of Gender Identity,” Philosophy East and West 55, no. 2 (2005): 225.

60 Andrea S. Goldman, Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770–1900 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012).

61 Wenqing Kang, Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900–1950 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009); Cuncun Wu and Mark Stevenson, “Male Love Lost: The Fate of Male Same-Sex Prostitution in Beijing in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Martin and Heinrich, Embodied Modernities, 42–59; John Zou, “Cross-Dressed Nation: Mei Lanfang and the Clothing of Modern Chinese Men,” in Martin and Heinrich, Embodied Modernities, 79–97; Giovanni Vitiello, The Libertine's Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

62 Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 256.

63 Paola Zamperini, Lost Bodies: Prostitution and Masculinity in Chinese Fiction (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

64 Zamperini, Lost Bodies, 43.

65 Jing M. Wang, When “I” Was Born: Women's Autobiography in Modern China (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).

66 Chunmei Du, Gu Hongming's Eccentric Chinese Odyssey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 169.

67 Geng Song and Derek Hird, Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 18. Song and Hird examine male images in popular television series, men's lifestyle magazines, the internet, at work, in entertainment and sport activities, and at home. The book begins and ends with discussions of Gender Trouble.

68 Xueping Zhong, Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of Late Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 12.

69 Zhong, Masculinity Besieged?, 38–39 (quotation from p. 39). Zhong begins the book by referencing Gender Trouble and the debates it engendered about Butler's rethinking of sex and gender. Zhong understands sex as a culturally formed concept while working from the premise that “the human body is at the same time a physiological and biological entity” (173).

70 Nancy Chen, “Embodying Qi and Masculinities in Post-Mao China,” in Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, eds. Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 315–33.

71 Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, 194.

72 Travis S. K. Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy (Hoboken, N.J.: Taylor & Francis, 2010), 19, 20.

73 Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities; Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).

74 Rachel Leng, “Queer Reflections and Recursion in Homoerotic Bildungsroman,” in Ghost Protocol: Development and Displacement in Global China, eds. Carlos Rojas and Ralph A. Litzinger (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 150–63.

75 Leng, “Queer Reflections and Recursion,” 153.

76 Leng, “Queer Reflections and Recursion,” 157.

77 Like several other works cited in this review, Leng draws here upon Butler's 1993 work Bodies That Matter.

78 Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, 226.

79 Fran Martin, “Chen Xue's Queer Tactics,” positions: east asia cultures critique 7, no. 1 (1999): 71–94. Martin argues that Chen's use of queer itself queers an order of things arising from Euro-American contexts. Martin's analysis, like that of Leng, draws upon Bodies That Matter.

80 Howard Chiang, “Imagining Transgender China,” in Transgender China, ed. Howard Chiang (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3–19.

81 Alvin Ka Hin Wong, “Transgenderism as a Heuristic Device: On the Cross-Historical and Transnational Adaptations of the Legend of the White Snake,” in Chiang, Transgender China, 127–58.

82 Carlos Rojas, “Writing the Body,” in Chiang, Transgender China, 199–223.

83 Chao-Jung Wu, “Peforming Transgender Desire: Male Cross-Dressing Shows in Taiwan,” in Chiang, Transgender China, 225–62.

84 [美] 朱迪斯⋅巴特勒 (Judith Butler), 性别麻烦 ：女性主义与身份的颠覆 [Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity], trans. 宋素凤 (上海三联书店, 2009). See also https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%80%A7%E5%88%AB%E9%BA%BB%E7%83%A6%EF%BC%9A%E5%A5%B3%E6%80%A7%E4%B8%BB%E4%B9%89%E4%B8%8E%E8%BA%AB%E4%BB%BD%E7%9A%84%E9%A2%A0%E8%A6%86/18286744?fromtitle=%E6%80%A7%E5%88%AB%E9%BA%BB%E7%83%A6&fromid=2541022.

85 A search in the scholarly articles sections of Baidu (xueshu.baidu.com) for Judith Butler (朱迪斯⋅巴特勒) and Gender Trouble (性别麻烦) yields articles in sociology, language and literature, and politics, mostly published within the past several years. See http://xueshu.baidu.com/s?wd=%E6%9C%B1%E8%BF%AA%E6%96%AF%C2%B7%E5%B7%B4%E7%89%B9%E5%8B%92%20%E6%80%A7%E5%88%AB%E9%BA%BB%E7%83%A6&tn=SE_baiduxueshu_c1gjeupa&sc_hit=1&bcp=2&ie=utf-8. Many thanks to Wang Zheng for personal communication about earlier workshops. Ning Wang attempts what he calls “a Chinese perspective” on gender studies. Ning Wang, “Gender Studies in the Post-Theoretical Era: A Chinese Perspective,” Comparative Literature Studies 54, no. 1 (2017): 14–30.

86 See Gail Hershatter, Women and China's Revolutions (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 275, 337n135 on Li.

87 Butler, Gender Trouble, 148.

88 Nicola Spakowski, “‘Gender’ Trouble: Feminism in China under the Impact of Western Theory and the Spatialization of Identity,” positions: east asia cultures critique 19, no. 1 (2011): 31–54. The problem of traveling theory and the Chinese context is explored, among others, in the work of Min Dongchao. For some of her writings in Chinese and English, see Spakowski, “‘Gender’ Trouble,” 49n8. Spakowski writes that Chinese feminist scholars experience “the empowering effect of a long tradition of commitment to women's issues and Chinese (feminist) history as a legacy and ‘resource.’ Many of the scholars discussed here are wary of cutting ties with pre-reform history, which has left deep imprints on the political life of China” (48).

89 Ha, Marie-Paule, “Double Trouble: Doing Gender in Hong Kong,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34, no. 2 (2009): 423–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

90 Ha, “Double Trouble,” 425.