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9 Jin Xing: China’s Transsexual Star of Dance Gloria Davies and M. E. Davies If we accept Daniel Boorstin’s observation that a ‘definable, publicizable personality’ (1972: 156) is crucial to the construction of a celebrity, and that the term celebrity is largely synonymous with being famous (as opposed to being infamous), then transsexual dancer, choreographer and actor Jin Xing has achieved an iconic status that perhaps even exceeds the banality of simply being famous. She is best known internationally for her widely acclaimed achievements in dance and choreography and her transsexuality is, in many ways, incidental to her success as an artist. Yet, it is arguably the issue of Jin Xing’s transsexuality that has made her a celebrity. This aspect of her fame is very much beyond her control and follows in much the same footsteps of earlier male to female transsexual celebrities such as Christine Jorgensen, Roberta Cowell and Renee Richards, whose lives all fell under intense media scrutiny once their transsexual background became public knowledge. In China where Jin Xing is best known, she is regularly described as ‘Jin Xing, the transsexual star of dance’. Nonetheless the sustained depth of the mainland Chinese media’s interest in her personal life as a wife and mother is an indication of how successfully she has integrated herself into mainstream Chinese culture despite (or because of) her transsexual status. To date, two documentary films, one in Chinese (Zhang 2000) and one in English (Levey et al. 2001), have been made about Jin Xing. Two Chinese-language autobiographies were published in Taiwan (Jin 2004) and mainland China (Jin 2005). More recently Atlantic Books published Shanghai Tango: A Memoir (2008), an English translation of Jin’s memoirs. Gloria Davies and M. E. Davies 170 Jin Xing, which translates as Venus, is her birth name and in numerous interviews she has noted that her name works across both genders. She has also commented that her mother chose the name for its simplicity and that it is ironic that the male-bodied infant named Jin Xing would end up leading a highly complicated life as a woman (Yin 2002: 183). Jin is often featured in Chinese magazines and in articles that have appeared on the Chinese Internet. She is regularly discussed in international newspapers and in magazines on modern dance and theatre. She is also presented as an example of a highly successful transsexual transition on numerous English-language websites that deal with issues of gender variance and gender reassignment. Throughout this chapter, we use the female pronoun in referring to Jin Xing. At the risk of stating the obvious we do so as this is her self-affirmed and legal gender and appropriate to her status as a married woman. However we make this point because in writing about Jin Xing, some authors use the female pronoun exclusively while others choose to switch between male and female pronouns to distinguish between her earlier life when male-bodied and her subsequent post-transition female-bodied life. As Joanne Meyerowitz (2002: 13) observes of the difficulty posed by something as simple as the use of an appropriate pronoun for gender variant people, it serves as ‘a reminder of how deeply we invest our everyday language and lives with constant references to gender’. Within mainland China, Jin Xing’s fame reflects the enormous growth of cultural pluralism that first developed out of market-dependent and non-official (minjian) cultural activities in the post-Maoist 1980s. The nascent cultural marketplace of the 1980s revolved around the burgeoning production of books, journals, film, theatre and art that catered to the enormous appetite for novel experiences among urban educated Chinese eager to ‘catch up with the West’ (ganshang xifang) after three austere decades under the harsh strictures of Maoist rule. In the early 1990s, when Jin Xing was gaining recognition as a dancer and choreographer in Europe and the USA, avant-garde works of the kind that first appeared in the 1980s (and that catapulted such filmmakers and artists as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Xu Bing and Wang Guangyi to international fame and acclaim) had already become synonymous with elite culture in China. Meanwhile, the producers of new avant-garde culture were themselves subjected to the unfamiliar pressures of market competition since their livelihoods were now largely dependent on commercial sponsors and the approval of the consuming public as opposed to that of the state. [3.147.42.168] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 12:34 GMT...

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