Backward Glances is a study of the conceptualization of female homoerotic relations in mainstream Chinese cultures. The first chapter traces the origins of the understanding of sexual relations between women to writings of the 1920s, and the remainder of the book focuses on literary, television, and film works produced in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from the 1970s to the present.
While focusing on contemporary Chinese cultures, Fran Martin's work is in close dialogue with the queer theory recently produced in Western academia. Backward Glances draws on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's influential contention that modern Western understandings of homosexuality and heterosexuality are fraught with tensions between a minoritizing discourse, which holds that only a small fraction of the population is homosexual, and a universalizing view, which assumes that everyone is potentially homosexual. Martin convincingly argues that female same-sex relationships in contemporary Chinese cultures are imagined through a form of utopian memorialism, based on the universalizing discourse and encapsulated by backward glances.
As Martin explains in chapter 2, in what she calls a “going-in story,” different from Western-style coming-out narratives, female homoerotic relations often appear in the past as a beautiful memory of the adolescent period, remembered and cherished by an adult woman. The “going-in” story adopts the tragic romance genre of popular Chinese fiction writing, in which an everywoman figure is attracted to a tomboy, loses her youthful love, and later enters into a heterosexual marriage. As a figure of loss, she is meant to command the sympathy and understanding of the reader. The representation of the masculine tomboy, in contrast, is based on the minoritizing discourse in the genre of melodrama, which eventually reveals the virtue of the misunderstood tomboy. While also soliciting the reader's sympathy, the fate of the tomboy, however, is either disappearance or death. Martin titles chapter 4, in which she discusses the tomboy character, “No Future.”
In chapter 5, Martin turns her attention to viewer responses to two television movies of schoolgirl romance. She compares the imaginary of female homoerotic relations in popular Chinese cultures with Judith Butler's psychoanalytical formulation of homosexuality in Euro-American contexts. Butler argues that heterosexuality involves a constant renunciation of homosexual attachments, which cannot be “openly grieved.” “The absence of cultural conventions for avowing the loss of homosexual love . . . produces the culture of heterosexual melancholy” (p. 143). In the context of Chinese popular cultures, instead of being a repressed attachment that cannot be named, the female homoerotic relationship is openly mourned through popular artistic works. Although relegated to the adolescent past, female same-sex relations continue to come back to haunt the heterosexual present. For Martin, the point of comparison is not to argue about which culture is more tolerant, a practice that only leads to a dead end in the study of sexuality, but rather to highlight the instability of socially enforced heterosexuality in different cultural contexts.
Martin points out the difference between Chinese and Western cultures, and she pays close attention to the nuances of works produced in different Chinese historical contexts. In chapter 3, “Postsocialist Melancholia,” arguing against the claim that representations of female same-sex love did not appear in mainland China until the mid-1990s, Martin offers an enlightening queer reading of “Blue Sky Green Sea,” Liu Suola's 1985 novella, which has mystified many literary critics. In narratives produced in Taiwan and Hong Kong, female homoerotic relations, which never develop beyond an adolescent stage, repeatedly end in what Chiu T'ien Hsin calls “ellipsis” (p. 62). In “Blue Sky Green Sea,” Martin argues, the topic suffers a double ellipsis. While the topic is clearly named in stories written in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the representation of a female homoerotic relationship is achieved exactly by not naming it as such in Liu's novella, which is why the meaning of the story eludes many readers. By relating the issue of homoerotic relations to the discussion of humanism in the mid-1980s, Martin situates Liu's novella clearly in the historical context of the high culture fever that occurred in mainland China.
The emergence of queer activism on a transnational level in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China in the last decade has prompted a crop of new films by feminist and lesbian identified directors. In the last chapter of the book, Martin persuasively argues that these new films, such as Incidental Journey, Butterfly, and Fish and Elephant, successfully interrupt and complicate the temporal mode of memorialism that characterized the representation of female homoerotic relations in earlier Chinese film and written texts, unambiguously bringing the topic of love between women into the present and the future.
Backward Glances is historically informed, theoretically sophisticated, cogently argued, and beautifully written. The book is a timely and important addition to gender and sexuality studies in the China field, and it certainly will enrich our knowledge in Chinese, feminist, and queer studies.
