China's Communist Party is currently attempting a putative revival of traditional, or quasi-traditional, culture. Even as it deploys the most advanced artificial intelligence to discipline the bodies and minds of its subjects, the Party is exhorting ordinary people to study the classics, venerate traditional (Han) culture, and emulate Confucian ethical–behavioral norms. This campaign has permeated the arts, education, recreation, religion, business, family life, and (of course) gender. One manifestation of this embrace of the ostensibly traditional is the many training courses that have sprung up to propagate models and rituals of femininity drawn from ancient texts and practices. These programs—some sponsored by the All-China Women's Federation, the official mass organization historically tasked with advancing the liberation of Chinese women—aim to transform female citizens into embodiments of Chinese womanly ideals.
Thus, this is an opportune moment for the publication of Eva Kit Wah Man's Bodies in China: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Gender, and Politics, which explores ethical and aesthetic ideals of woman and the feminine in Chinese philosophical tradition and contemporary Chinese society. A professor of humanities and creative writing at Hong Kong Baptist University, Man takes an interdisciplinary approach to these questions, and the subject matter of the essays in this volume varies widely. Chapters probe the gendered implications of Confucian ethical and social philosophies, embroidery as gendered practice and institution, kissing in Chinese culture, extreme body art, traditional Chinese garden construction, female bodily aesthetics, beauty and the Chinese state, contemporary fashion, psychoanalysis in the Chinese context, and representations of female sex workers in traditional literature and popular culture. Though wide-ranging, these chapters reveal the ways Chinese women's bodies have served and continue to serve as sites and vehicles of ideological, economic, and nationalist struggle.
One of Man's goals in this volume is to engage Western feminist theories of gender and the body, as well as Western philosophical understandings of selfhood more generally. Man is well versed in Western feminist and gender theory, and she endeavors to connect the insights of writers such as Judith Butler, Moira Gatens, Naomi Wolf, and even Baruch Spinoza to the works of Confucius, Mencius, and their interpreters. Among other things, she explores whether traditional Chinese ethical and social philosophies might provide perspectives on gender and selfhood that Western feminist theory, in her view, typically overlooks. Her answer to this question is equivocal. Man states that the “alternative body ontology” implied in traditional Confucian, Mencian, and Daoist thought “can initiate a radical rethinking of the connections among reason, the body, and ethical political issues” of significance to contemporary feminism (16), though this claim is not so much demonstrated as asserted. At the same time, Man acknowledges the limitations for feminism of texts and ideas long intertwined with patriarchal politics and culture.
Man's writings can be understood as part of a broader reappraisal of traditional Chinese social and political philosophy that has unfolded over the last few decades, led primarily by Asian scholars in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, the People's Republic of China (PRC), and some Western nation states. A subset of this scholarship has tackled the relevance of Confucianism (broadly understood) for questions of gender and women's emancipation, as in The Sage and the Second Sex, edited by Chenyang Li. Although fully aware of the tensions inherent in such a project, proponents of this reappraisal hold that certain Confucian, neo-Confucian, and/or Daoist perspectives can work to, in Man's words, “displace dualism and emancipate notions of the body from Cartesian mechanistic models and metaphors” (ix).
Man's primary interest and expertise lies in traditional Chinese ethics, aesthetics, and social philosophy. Sections dealing with the gendered dimensions of Confucian, Daoist, and neo-Confucian thought are among the most insightful in the book. The book is less successful in its discussions of recent and contemporary body politics, and Man makes some perplexing choices regarding what she includes and what she leaves out. The title of the volume notwithstanding, there is frustratingly little discussion of bodies under Chinese socialism. For example, a chapter on Chinese female bodily aesthetics includes just one paragraph on the Maoist era, sandwiched between an extended discussion of late Imperial literary depictions of courtesans and a brief overview of beauty practices in the post-Mao era. A subsequent chapter on beauty and the state devotes just four paragraphs to the socialist period. Man justifies her approach by suggesting that communist revolutionaries and state builders regarded female beauty as unimportant; Chinese women in this era, she argues, were called on to “[devote] their energy to economic and political practices and reforms,” and a “shapeless, socialist look” prevailed (134). In her view, the ideal Chinese woman under communism was a “sexually neutral” female proletarian who was “not sexy or romantic but devoted all [her] sexual and emotional energy to loving [her] nation” (143–4). Not until “China opened its door in the late seventies did its [sic] women brighten up their looks again” (135), and it “was not until the 1980s that female sexual bodies were depicted with a new liberating fervor” (145).
It is certainly true that communist revolutionaries, like the nationalist revolutionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rejected many traditional and bourgeois practices of female self-adornment and advocated revolutionary asceticism. However, it is not the case that the Communists rejected beauty or that female bodily aesthetics were irrelevant to the revolutionary project. A growing body of research analyzing revolutionary drama, literature, memoirs, propaganda, and other materials has shown that, in historian Hung-Yok Ip's words, “an interest in [female] beauty” was a “general and pervading presence in the revolution” (Ip Reference Ip2003: 331). Female beauty was in fact harnessed to the revolutionary project; revolutionaries “did not reject but helped sustain the interest in female beauty by mobilizing self-beautification practices and images of attractive women for political purposes” (Ip Reference Ip2003: 330).
Man's disinterest in probing socialist critiques of beauty and femininity is consistent with the sometimes conservative, even elitist tenor of her analysis. For example, the “superficial and flattened” representations of Chinese women in the globalizing economy are contrasted unfavorably with depictions of women “created by traditional Chinese literati” (149). In Man's view, these traditional (male) literati representations “were resources of imagination and interpretation, operating within the spiritual domains of ethics and aesthetics. They were more than representations; they held meaning and expressed aesthetic qualities waiting to be appreciated and contemplated” (149). Similarly, Man contrasts the passive, manipulated body of the contemporary Chinese consumer of women's fashion with the persona of the Ming Dynasty courtesan, whose embodiment of male literati fantasies she regards as a kind of heroism (133–34). The embrace of fashion that Man portrays as embodying individual agency and self-expression in 1960s Hong Kong becomes, in the PRC of the 1990s, slavish imitation of Western consumerism. These inconsistencies may reflect the fact that the book is a collection of stand-alone essays, more than half of which were published previously. Arguments made in one chapter are sometimes at odds with those made in another; in other places the analysis is repetitive. The book ends abruptly, without a conclusion, and overall the whole is somewhat less than the sum of its parts.
These limitations notwithstanding, Man's book will appeal to theorists seeking to know more about traditional Chinese philosophical approaches to gender, the body, and selfhood. It will also appeal to scholars of comparative philosophy, especially those interested in the continuities and discontinuities between traditional Chinese social philosophy and the politics of the current age. In an era in which gender increasingly is regarded as an internal, subjective identity, Eva Kit Wah Man's interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach is a useful reminder of the role of social norms and embodied practice in constructing gender and the self.
