Editor's Introduction

Each of this issue’s first four essays considers how gender differentials work geopolitically. In her polemic “Sex Machine: Global Hypermasculinity and Images of the Asian Woman in Modernity,” Lily H. M. Ling takes the position that processes of economic globalization are masculinizing the social relations of domination. A perceptual grid consisting of media image, advertising, and state propaganda campaigns conditions local production and consumption practices. These forces of hypermasculinity work across anatomical sex (some women are hypermasculinized; some men, hyperfeminized), national-origin, and state boundaries. Ideology trumps anatomy. Because it figures all achievements as masculine, hypermasculinity masculinizes achievement while feminizing all service-oriented work, subordinated populations, and minoritized states. The dynamic of macro- or hypergendering suggests to Ling that it is time we reconsider familiar binarial oppositions such as local and global, West and the rest, here and there.

Tim Oakes’s view on the processes of transnationalizing capital places gender difference differently in economic globalization. Oakes looks at gendered labor, particularly feminized labor, through what he calls a local lens, because for him the local is a place where agents of national-development policies and agents of displaced late capital set up shop together. In “Bathing in the Far Village: Globalization, Transnational Capital, and the Cultural Politics of Modernity in China,” Oakes examines a scheme set up in the villages of a Chinese ethnic minority, the Miao people, to market “authentic” batik to altruistic consumers in elite markets on the West Coast of North America. His point is not only that consumption schemes based on benevolent hallucinations about sustainable development, cultural survival, and gender empowerment will backfire but that an analytic focus on them erases the activities of the Chinese state. Decentralized Chinese state policy favors the economics of tourism and thus rests its modernization schemes on making sure it retains the key attraction, which is to say, ethnic primitives and their authentic batik work. Gender intersects with ethnicization and state capitalism.

Mary Ann O’Donnell’s “Path Breaking: Constructing Gendered Nationalism in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone” shifts the gender axis yet again. Neither macrology nor a local study of differentiated labor, “Path Breaking” treats gender as a plastic relation of difference that is always available in social-control efforts and yet always under revision. According to O’Donnell, iconography and social policies during the pioneer days of the Shenzhen Special Economics Zone naturalized women’s dependence on men. These post-Maoist state policies unfolded in a context of market formation, labor migration, and internal restructuring of the relation between urban and rural. So the sanctioned ideological representation O’Donnell uses to focus her discussion mirrors a newly normative ideological relation between men and women that is somewhat at odds with demographic realities. This normative, regressive heteropatriarchy arose in the intersection of national and global capitalism, where subjects encounter globalizing forces and are consequently masculinized—perhaps even hypermasculinized. O’Donnell clearly shows how the Chinese state ends up being a broker between the Chinese population and the world capitalist system and how this equation works through the intersections of class and gender, past and present, and countryside and urban sprawl within the international division of labor.

In the last of these four essays on gendered themes, Joshua Goldstein considers the career of opera star Mei Lanfang, icon of Republican Chinese nationalism. Goldstein demonstrates how the historical changes from local to national opera, from elite performances of operatic gendered stereotypes to popular representations of a nationalized “traditional” femininity, and from an invented tradition of femininity to the gendering of citizenship as male all unfolded in the person of Mei Lanfang, a male actor of female or dan characters. Mei was both a performer of gendered difference, being a female impersonator, and an icon of the liberalization and commercialization of public sexuality. But, Goldstein argues, what Mei’s popularity attested to was a logic of gender that hypostatized a purely Chinese aesthetic and isolated this purity from westernization, from realism, and from lewdness. Retaining national difference meant, logically enough, that Mei reproduce Chinese essence in the West. Goldstein concludes his narrative with an account...