1 Peggy Phelan, “Feminist Theory, Poststructuralism, and Performance,” TDR 32.1 (1988): 107–27, at 108–9. The international gathering was the September 1986 International School for Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) Congress organized and hosted by theatre director Eugenio Barba, under the title of “The Female Role as Represented on the Stage in Various Cultures.”

2 Ibid., 109.

3 Ibid., 109–10.

4 Ibid., 111.

5 Scholars of classical Asian performances such as Avanthi Meduri have questioned the legitimacy of projecting the Western feminist gaze onto the body of the Indian male cross-dresser. In her critique of Phelan’s interpretation of the Indian odissi dancer, Meduri points out that much of Phelan’s reading is brought to bear out of the art’s native context and contends that the spectator–actor relation in the odissi tradition does not necessarily function in the way Phelan suggests. See Avanthi Meduri, “Western Feminist Theory, Asian Indian Performance, and a Notion of Agency,” Women and Performance 5.2 (1992): 90–103. Phelan, both in her TDR essay and in a subsequent text that responds to Meduri’s criticism, insists that the subject of her analysis is specifically the performances at the ISTA conference, and thus defends the validity of her position. See Phelan, Peggy, “Crisscrossing Cultures,” Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing, ed. Ferris, Lesley (New York: Routledge, 1993), 155–77Google Scholar. My essay, however, is not at all interested in supplying a native point of view to combat the theory of Western feminism. Instead, it is the same epistemological premises shared by both Western feminists and “native” Chinese practitioners in the twentieth century that initiate and sustain my research.

6 It is notoriously difficult to describe xiqu (literally, “play [of] sung-verse”) in English. As an umbrella term and a loosely defined taxonomy, xiqu now refers to a mixed body of more than three hundred theatrical subgenres in China. In English, xiqu has been conventionally designated by other popular terminologies, among which are “Chinese opera” and “traditional Chinese theatre.”

7 Morinaga, Maki, “The Gender of Onnagata as the Imitating Imitated: Its Historicity, Performativity, and Involvement in the Circulation of Femininity,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 10.2 (2002): 245–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Isaka, Maki, “Box-Lunch Etiquette: Conduct Guides and Kabuki Onnagata ,” in Manners and Mischief: Gender, Power, and Etiquette in Japan, ed. Bardsley, Jan and Miller, Laura (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 48–66 Google Scholar.

9 Morinaga, “Gender of Onnagata.”

10 This point crystallized in a conversation with Maki Isaka.

11 Or “male dan,” male players of female roles in Chinese theatre. The category of the dan encompasses a diverse range of female characters in xiqu, including (among others) married women of noble origin, lively young maidens or courtesans, and female generals versed in martial arts. It is important to note that my subsequent analysis of nandan’s gender politics is not necessarily applicable to the role type of female clowns, also known as caidan (comic dan), because caidan performances are conventionally associated with the chou (or clowns) rather than the dan. I would like to thank Jiang Ji of Renmin University of China for asking me to make this clarification.

12 Young, Stark, “Mei Lan-Fang” [1930], in Theatre Arts on Acting, ed. Senelick, Laurence (London: Routledge, 2008), 174–83Google Scholar, at 176.

13 The limited original footage, held at the Moving Image Research Collections at the University of South Carolina (Fox Movietone News Story 5-281), has been made available online for public access. “China’s Greatest Actor—Outtakes,” https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/MVTN/id/2191/rec/1, accessed 6 July 2024.

14 Charles Collins, “Mei Lan-Fang,” Chicago Tribune, 7 April 1930, 37.

15 Ibid. The item description for “China’s Greatest Actor—Outtakes” refers to her as Yang Su.

16 “China’s Greatest Actor—Outtakes.”

17 Collins, “Mei Lan-Fang.”

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Karl K. Kitchen, “Karl Kitchen on Mei Lan-Fang,” The Sun (New York), 24 February 1930, 16.

21 Marybeth Hamilton, “‘I’m the Queen of the Bitches’: Female Impersonation and Mae West’s Pleasure Man,” in Crossing the Stage, ed. Ferris, 107–30, at 107.

22 Nereson, Ariel, “Queens ‘Campin” Onstage: Performing Queerness in Mae West’s ‘Gay Plays,’” Theatre Journal 64.4 (2012): 513–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 513.

23 Ibid., 529.

24 Ibid., 528–32.

25 Quite contrary to what the literal meaning of the term may suggest, these “private residences” were in fact semipublic sites that elicited visits of literati from all corners of the empire and housed one of the most popular institutions of sex and entertainment in Beijing in the late Qing dynasty. During the past two decades or so, scholars in the West and China, such as Cuncun Wu, Mark Stevenson, Andrea Goldman, and Xinmiao Wu, have jointly noted the prominent role that siyu played in Qing Beijing’s social and cultural sphere. Their scholarship in both English and Chinese has brought to light a subject that had been little known and updated much of our understanding of the connoisseurship of theatre actors in late Qing Beijing. See Cuncun Wu, “The Commercialization of Male-Love: The World of Boy-Actors,” in Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 111–58; 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 Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures, ed. Fran Martin and Larissa Heinrich (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 42–59; Cuncun Wu, Xiwai zhi xi: Qing zhongwanqi jingcheng de xiyuan wenhua yu liyuan siyuzhi [Theatre beyond the stage: Beijing’s culture of playhouses and the institution of private residences during the middle to late period of the Qing dynasty] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017); Andrea S. Goldman, Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770–1900 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Xinmiao Wu, Liyuan siyu kaolun: Qingdai lingren shenghuo, yanju ji yishu chuancheng [Investigation and discussion of the siyu of theatrical players: The lives of actors, theatrical performances, and art transmission during the Qing dynasty] (Beijing: Xueyuan chubanshe, 2017).

26 See Goldman, “Opera Aficionados and Guides to Boy Actresses,” in Opera and the City, 17–60.

27 Before the advent of modernity in China, gender distinctions were deemed reflective of cosmological order rather than biologically determined. In addition, men and women were considered complementary rather than mutually exclusive. See Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture, and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995), 14–20.

28 Wu, Guanda, “Mustache as Resistance: Representation and Reception of Mei Lanfang’s Masculinity,” TDR 60.2 (2016): 122–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Or “female dan,” i.e., female players of female roles in Chinese theatre.

30 Zhu Yu, “Cheng Yanqiu fangwen ji” [Interview with Cheng Yanqiu (1933)], in Cheng Yanqiu riji [Diary of Cheng Yanqiu], ed. Cheng Yongjiang (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 2010), 245–50, at 246.

31 The term literally means “photorealism,” used often interchangeably with another Chinese aesthetic term, xieshi [literally, “inscribing the real”]. Both terms are often translated as “realism.”

32 Xieyi literally means “inscribing the essence/meaning,” which was initially conceived to describe an aesthetic in traditional Chinese paintings but later also used to characterize the fundamental artistic pursuit of xiqu. Due to lack of a precise equivalent in English, xieyi has been variously translated as “symbolic,” “expressionist,” or “ideographic.”

33 Zhu, “Cheng Yanqiu fangwen ji,” 248; translation and emphasis mine.

34 Ibid., 249.

35 Houzai Zhang, “Wode zhongguo jiuxi guan” [My views on Chinese old drama], Xin qingnian [New youth] 5.4 (1918): 343–8, at 344; translation mine.

36 Translations mine. Joshua Goldstein has thoroughly studied Qi Rushan’s theorization of traditional Chinese theatre. See Goldstein, Joshua, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-creation of Peking Opera, 1870–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 134–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a previous work of mine, I analyzed how Republican literatus and drama critic Wang Pingling defended the worthiness of nandan by underscoring xiqu’s supposedly “aestheticized” (shenmeihua) nature, a cultural position that was clearly influenced by the discourse of xiqu “aestheticism.” See Wu, Guanda, “Should Nandan be Abolished? The Debate over Female Impersonation in Early Republican China and Its Underlying Cultural Logic,” Asian Theatre Journal 30.1 (2013): 189–206 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 I acknowledge that various authors have fiercely debated which term best represents the supposed quintessence of xiqu since the Republican era. However, I have no intention of engaging in the debate. Instead, I opt for “aestheticism” for its inclusiveness as a term.

38 McGrath, Jason, “Acting Real: Cinema, Stage, and the Modernity of Performance in Chinese Silent Film,” in The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, ed. Rojas, Carlos and Chow, Eileen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 401–20Google Scholar, at 412.

39 Ibid., 411–12.

40 Ibid., 411.

41 Ibid.

42 Zhu Yu, “Cheng Yanqiu fangwen ji,” 248; translation mine.

43 Alma Whitaker, “Mei Lang-fang [sic] Scorns Reality,” Los Angeles Times, 18 May 1930, B11.

44 Los Angeles Times, “Mei Len-fang [sic] Captures East,” 2 March 1930, B27.

45 Rao, Nancy Yunhwa, “Racial Essences and Historical Invisibility: Chinese Opera in New York, 1930,” Cambridge Opera Journal 12.2 (2000): 135–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 143–4.

46 Goldstein, Joshua, “Mei Lanfang and the Nationalization of the Peking Opera, 1912–1930,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 7.2 (1999): 377–420 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 409.

47 Goldstein, Drama Kings, 273.

48 Los Angeles Times, “Mei Len-fang Captures East,” B27.

49 Xun Huisheng, “Yao nuli suzao renwu” [Must make efforts to construct characters], in Xun Huisheng yanju sanlun [Xun Huisheng’s treatises on theatre acting] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1980), 30–2, at 30–1; translation mine.

50 Occasions on which the performances of nüdan enriched the stagecraft of noted nandan players, as documented by late Qing and early Republican sources, are by no means rare, though such incidents are generally overlooked by existing literature. For instance, Mei Lanfang’s performance of Huanhai chao [Waves in the ocean of officialdom] in 1915 was inspired by a bangzi troupe of female actors named “the Weide Society of Female Actors” (weide kunshe) as well as the famed early Republican nüdan Xian Lingzhi. It was the female actors who first staged the popular play, and Mei followed suit. See Mei Lanfang and Xu Jichuan, “Forty Years of Life on the Stage” (Wutaishenghuo sishinian), in Mei Lanfang Quanji [The complete works of Mei Lanfang], 8 vols., ed. Fu Jin (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 2016), 6: 288.

51 Xiaoyan Deng, “Transgressing the Stage: Female Xiqu Performers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 2024), 86–126.

52 Xun, “Yao nuli suzao renwu,” 30.

53 Ibid., 30–1.

54 While it is true that plays from xiqu’s classical repertories are set in premodern China, various forms of modernized/reformed xiqu have experimented with modern femininity since the late Qing. For instance, Mei Lanfang and Shang Xiaoyun both performed the so-called contemporary-costume new plays (shizhuang xinxi) in the first decades of the Republican era, which featured modern urban women as their heroines. Also, by the early 1960s, when Xun composed this particular diary entry, productions of “modern plays” (xiandai xi), which were generally set in the twentieth century and dedicated to contemporary themes, had blossomed. The fact that Xun bracketed off discussion about xiqu’s representation of modern women is striking. If the distance between women in antiquity and women in modern times indeed poses a challenge for contemporary nüdan effectively playing female roles in the classical repertoire, as Xun hinted, it is reasonable to question whether contemporary nüdan are in a much better position than nandan to play modern female characters, given their shared social and cultural “customs.” Without addressing the question that potentially gives nüdan an advantage over nandan, Xun’s discussion of the relationship between nandan and nüdan seemed rather unfair to the female actors.

55 Ibid., 30.

56 Of course, one may argue that any effort to make an essential distinction between the theatrical and the mundane is destined to fail, as the Latin idea of theatrum mundi (or “the world as a stage”) continues to afford us a strong perspective on the relationship between life and fiction in the twenty-first century.

57 Lanfang, Mei and Jichuan, Xu, Wutai shenghuo sishinian [Forty years of life on the stage] (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1987), 555–6Google Scholar.

58 Ibid., 556; translation mine.

59 Ibid.

60 Xun, “Yao nuli suzao renwu,” 31; emphasis added.

61 Huisheng, Xun, Xiaoliuxiangguan riji [Diary of Xun Huisheng] (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2016), 116 Google Scholar; translation mine.

62 Ibid.; translation mine.

63 See Ma’er Xiansheng [Feng Shuluan], “Tufa yu tunu” [Rabbit owners and rabbit slaves], Jing bao [The crystal], 15 May 1924, 3; “Cheng Ke yu Zhu Qinxin fengchao” [The incident involving Cheng Ke and Zhu Qinxin], Shengching shibao [Shengching news], 31 March 1933, 3; Bai’an maozhu, pseud., “Cheng Ke yu Zhu Qinxin” [Cheng Ke and Zhu Qinxin], Shehui ribao [Social daily], 4 July 1935, 2.

64 “Zhu Qinxin xinzhuang jiadachang” [Zhu Qinxin recently installed prosthetic large intestine], Tianfeng bao [Celestial wind news], 8 February 1933, 2.

65 For a detailed discussion of Zhu Qinxin’s lawsuit against Tianfeng bao, see Kang, Wenqing, Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China, 1900–1950 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 132–4Google Scholar.

66 Lin Shu, Lin Shu jiashu [Lin Shu’s family letters], ed. Xia Xiaohong and Bao Limin (Beijing: Commercial Press, 2016), 77, 90.

67 For an analysis of photographic representations of nandan in the prominent Republican-era pictorial Beiyang huabao [Northern China pictorial], see Guanda Wu, “Nandan, Gender Plasticity, and the Dichotomization of ‘Artistic’ Femininity versus ‘Natural’ Masculinity from China’s Republican Era to the Early PRC, 1912–Early 1960s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2017), 143–54.

68 Bai Hutong, pseud., “Xiao Cuihua de ‘danqi’” [Xiao Cuihua’s aura of the dan], Dongfang ribao [Oriental daily], 15 July 1947, 6; translations mine.

69 Xiao Cuihua [Yu Lianquan], Jingju huadan biaoyan yishu [The art of the flowery dan performance in jingju] (Beijing: Beijing chubanshe, 1962), 157; translation mine.

70 Morinaga, “Gender of Onnagata.”

71 Following initial acclaim among theatre scholars for her insights into gender as performance in earlier works, Judith Butler rearticulated her concept of performativity by defining it against theatricality in her Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 12–13. Scholars in theatre and performance studies, including Elin Diamond and Ayako Kano, have raised doubts about the validity of such a distinction in understanding performances of gender. See Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (London: Routledge, 1997), 46–7; Ayako Kano, “Acting Like a Woman,” in Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 3–14. I concur with Diamond and Kano on this issue.