Rosemary Roberts's Maoist Model Theatre is the first book-length study in English on the popular symbolism of gender and sexuality in the “model works,” yangbanxi, of Cultural Revolution China. The “model works” are renowned for their specific origins in the Cultural Revolution period, during which Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's last wife, developed and designated them to establish a new proletarian art form as she wrestled with the conservatives for Party leadership. As Roberts has correctly noted, although many elements of the yangbanxi operas had existed prior to the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing played a crucial role in selecting from a larger group of experimental modernized Beijing Operas and then bringing together the nation's best artists and performers to refine the “model works” under her guidance. Analysing a dozen or so yangbanxi operas, ballets and symphonic suites, Roberts deftly unpacks the ways in which gendered meanings are constructed through different theatrical systems: role assignment, costume, props, kinesics and linguistics.
One of the central aims of the book is to revise the conventional depiction of the Cultural Revolution as a period of the “erasure of gender and sexuality.” Roberts argues that far from being “erased,” the discourse and cultural parameters of gender and sexuality were reconfigured along political lines in this pivotal period of PRC history: “with the parameters for ‘the revolution’ shifted towards the masculine end of the gender continuum and the parameters for the ‘counter revolution’ shifted towards the feminine end. Within each political category, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary, relative gender differentiation was maintained” (p. 23). The author should be lauded for proposing an ambitious approach to challenging the earlier insights of Meng Yue, Mayfair Yang and others, who have characterized this period as “genderless.” Roberts's refreshing perspective not only complicates our under-developed understandings of Maoist-era cultural history, but also provides a new angle for looking at familiar sources. However, as the above quote makes clear, Roberts's analysis often suffers from a simple conceptualization of “gender differentiation,” or the meanings of “masculine” and “feminine” as analytic categories, thereby reinforcing rather than challenging the very binary oppositions she claims to exceed.
One example comes from her analysis of leadership roles assigned to women in yangbanxi. In discussing the role distribution of central female heroic characters, Roberts's overarching point is that “If we start by examining the contexts in which the yangbanxi heroines are placed, we can see that Maoist thought combines with traditional gender beliefs to perpetuate gender role divisions and the traditional gender hierarchy in new forms” (p. 42). The yangbanxi opera most famous for featuring a female Party representative leader is perhaps none other than Azalea Mountain. It is true that the central heroine, Ke Xiang, initially faced an enormous measure of resistance among the men whom she tried to win over at Azalea Mountain. Yet, it would be inadequate to interpret this plot on a basic structural level to mean “male power is not to be questioned while female power is a source of doubt and questioning; female leaders cannot control their subordinates whereas male leaders can” (p. 45). Such a structural reading is insufficient because it neglects the wide spectrum of possible signification enabled by the cultural-semiotic representations of gender. In other words, this is merely one (and perhaps the least surprising) of the many possible ways of conveying the significance of Ke Xiang's leadership role in the opera. One could also say, for instance, that Ke Xiang's overall role overturns normative expectations of what a woman can accomplish. After all, she eventually wins over the same group of men who repeatedly questioned her from the start. Should the emphasis be placed on Ke Xiang's initial difficulty or the power she later held over her male subordinates?
It is surprising for a book on the semiotics of gender and sexuality to remain remarkably silent on the theory of gender citationality developed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1989), which is absent from the bibliography. Butler's work, of course, relied on earlier studies of ideological interpellation by Louis Althusser, whom Roberts cites. But Butler's theorization is most pertinent to grasping the meanings of gender and sexuality in Maoist model theatre, because it questions any stance that posits a core “essence” to gender identity. When applied to our assessment of the gendering nature of role assignments in yangbanxi, this theoretical perspective challenges a structural equation of “successful” leadership with masculinity. Rather, in the example of Ke Xiang's leadership role in Azalea Mountain, the performance of her leadership ability itself is an act of gender subversion: it shows that her leadership is not a copy of an “original” masculine role or identity, but the “original” masculine connotations of political leadership are already a “copy” whose signification crucially anchors on its iteration and citation on other genderly marked bodies.
The gendering of the intertextual discourse on leadership in the yangbanxi, therefore, cannot be settled on the degree of success achieved by heroine characters in the plot narrative. It would be too easy to identify this criterion simply as a semiotic source for perpetuating traditional gender hierarchies. Alternatively, by exposing and destabilizing the constructed nature of these gender hierarchies, a more theoretically layered reading would highlight the performative interpellations of gender coding in Cultural Revolution model works.
