At the Juncture of Censure and Mass Voyeurism: Narratives of Female Homoerotic Desire in Post-Mao China

In the years immediately following Mao Zedong's death, fiction writers in the People's Republic of China consistently pushed the limits of sexual representation. The liberation of desire was considered a project integral to the restoration of subjectivity to individuals, a topic that dominated Chinese intellectual discussions in the mid-1980s. ¹ In this cultural milieu many works rescuing human desire from sexual puritanism, state repression, the institution of marriage, and the pragmatism of procreation appeared in the 1980s, such as Zhang Xianliang's The Other Half of Man Is Woman[Nanren de yiban shi nüren] (1985) and Wang Anyi's three novellas about "illicit love" [san lian] (1985-86). The literary trend of exploring sexuality has continued into the 1990s and the new century, an era whose cultural economy differs dramatically from that of the mid-1980s, in that elite ideologies such as aesthetic humanism have lost their luster and cultural production is now complicated by market competition for audience and profit. ² The most scandalous, best-selling erotic publication in China in the early 1990s was probably Jia Pingwa's Abandoned Capital [Fei du], whose traditional vernacular style and numerous sex scenes—often insinuated by deliberate marks of omission—made critics liken it to the Ming-dynasty erotic masterpiece The Golden Lotus [Jin ping mei]. ³ In 1996 something peculiar happened. The editor responsible for the publication of The Abandoned Capital advised a female writer that, if she wanted to find a publisher willing to put out a work she had finished some time earlier, she would have to delete its entire first chapter because of its inappropriate sexual material and would have to make significant changes to the sexual descriptions throughout the rest of the novel. What was this novel? How could it be judged obscene compared with The Abandoned Capital, the modern Golden Lotus?

The female writer is Lin Bai, and the novel in question is One Person's War [Yige ren de zhanzheng]. Completed in 1993, it was rejected by several serious literary magazines before the Guangzhou-based avant-garde journal Flower City [Huacheng] accepted it. This initial publication was uneventful. The reception of the novel changed, however, when another publisher issued it in book form in July 1994 and used the photograph of a female nude on the front cover to market it. In no time the book was denounced as "pornography" [chungong] and "obscenity" [huangse] in the Chinese Book Review [Zhonghua dushubao], published by the Bureau of News and Publications (Xinwen chuban shu). Some writers and critics came to Lin's rescue and defended her work in the Review, but by then One Person's War was notorious. ⁴

As a remedial measure, Lin retrieved the copyright to the novel and looked for a new publisher. However, none of the seven publishers her agent contacted was willing to touch it for fear of violating the government's taboo. Not until the agent asked the editor of The Abandoned Capital to review Lin's work did Lin learn what was wrong with One Person's War. Nevertheless, the editor's diagnosis puzzled her. While The Abandoned Capital has frequent sex scenes, there is very little sex in One Person's War. Yet the editor urged her to censor her work. ⁵

In 1998, when Lin described to me the puzzlement, anger, and despair she had experienced in 1996, it occurred to me that what was at issue was not the amount of sex in her work but an implicit hierarchy of sex. ⁶ Although the Chinese censors may not have been entirely aware of their own standards, it made all the difference for the censors what kind of sex act was described and by whom. The only kind of sex that ever...