As its title suggests, The Cosmopolitan Dream addresses Chinese masculinities in the context of transnational settings. Each of the essays focuses on middle class to affluent urban men from mainland China, although at times they are located in other countries. After the Introduction, the volume is divided into two parts, with six chapters each. The first section, entitled “Representing men transnationally” focuses on fictional contexts including films, literature and television shows. The second half, “Enacting transnational Chinese masculinities,” primarily centres on non-fictional, but at times highly scripted, mass-mediated portrayals such as blogs, newspaper columns, online discussion forums and reality TV.
Miriam Driessen's and Tingyu Kang's chapters are the exception to this rule. They are less concerned with mass mediated depictions of masculinity than with the familial tensions and emotional strains of absent fathers who have chosen to live in a different country than their family because of work opportunities or the desire for children to gain foreign citizenship. These two chapters create a nice dialogue with each other in that one focuses on Chinese fathers who are working in Africa whose families remain in China, and the other is on Chinese fathers who stay in the PRC while their wives and children live abroad. In the latter instance, there is also a fascinating exploration of the phenomenon of masculine helpers’ negotiation of masculinity as they fill in for the absent husbands by doing male-coded chores such as repairs and driving, but also female-coded tasks such as grocery shopping or cleaning. Lin Song's chapter also focuses on fatherhood in addressing the wildly popular television show Dad, Where Are We Going?, a reality TV series that focuses on famous fathers, their childrearing techniques, the ways in which their children are affected, and online discourses about proper Chinese fatherhood. In this show, traditional aloof and disciplinarian fatherly roles are contrasted with more “Western” style permissive models. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fathers who walk the line between these two extremes are deemed to be the ideal. All three essays address the ways in which traditional conceptions of fatherhood, and masculinity more generally, are challenged by, and adapted for, contemporary political economies and global cultural flows.
Another outlier is Hongwei Bao's chapter “Haunted Chinese gay identity” which examines the intersection of economic class, masculinity and sexuality in a novel that was later made into a film. This chapter explores the ways in which a tale is retold in different forms of media as well as in its transnational reception. This forms a nice counterpoint to the rest of the essays which are focused on heteronormative frameworks.
Transnational identities implicitly draw on being caught between differing expectations that are born of varied cultural influences. This therefore becomes a unifying theme among all of the chapters. In addition to the essays I have outlined above, the volume includes chapters that present a German crime television series, Chinese masculinity in Japan, and online feuds between women who date American men and the Chinese men who resent it. These essays address geographically dislocated Chinese identities. Other chapters instead focus on cosmopolitan lifestyles that are partially inspired by the outside world but that are firmly located in the PRC. This includes research on culinary masculinity, fictional presentations of romance, villainy, androgyny (wen), hypermasculine (wu) identities and the contextualization of modern masculinities with the nostalgia that permeates much of Chinese society. These case studies demonstrate that modernist negotiations of age-old ideals are in dialogue with the cacophony of alternatives that are presented by global media.
As with any edited volume, the goal here is breadth rather than depth. Because the essays are often quite brief (ranging from 12 to 20 pages), a good portion of each essay is devoted to establishing the context (outlining the plot of a TV show for example). As a result, this well written and fascinating collection of essays provides an intriguing taster box that leaves one wanting to read more on each subject. The strength of this approach is that this one volume has a breath taking range of thought-provoking forms of masculinity in a wide range of settings, as interpreted by several different disciplinary frameworks. As the title suggests, this forcefully reminds us that one should always frame Chinese masculinities in the plural tense.
The Cosmopolitan Dream would be equally welcome in any Asian studies or cultural studies undergraduate or graduate syllabus. The seemingly disparate chapters are unified by the transnational focus on cosmopolitan masculinity. In turn, they revolve around issues of China's changing roles in the context of new political economies that are intrinsically interwoven with transnational dialogues about men and women, individuals and the collective, as well as the ways in which mass mediated frameworks provide models to emulate, to question and to juxtapose with our daily lives.
