Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary (review)

In this work, Fran Martin, one of the most prolific authors on the topic, provides a fascinating kaleidoscope of the female homoeroticism found in Chinese media and literature. By shifting between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) proper, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and referring back to the Chinese Republican period of the 1920s and 1930s, Fran Martin shows how various narratives, discourses, perceptions, and representations have interacted. By bringing in Western discourses and descriptions, she succeeds in breaking up and broadening standard descriptions of the Eastern-Western binary that have often been prevalent in writings about homoeroticism and homosexuality in China and Hong Kong. She focuses on descriptions found in the mainstream media to present a convincing picture of the “crisis of the dominant sex-gender system” (p. 7), arguing that “the system of enforced adult hetero-maritality coexists alongside its own remarkably candid critique” (p. 8). After offering an overview of the existing English-language literature on female homoeroticism, which is enlarged upon in chapter 1, she provides a brief introduction to the period under research, which started with a complicated process shaped by the indigenization of European sexological theory in China in the 1920s and 1939s; a similar process could also be observed in Taiwan, which, at that time, was a Japanese colony. For the author, the two most important issues are the adaption of Havelock Ellis’s mutually exclusive situational/temporary and congenital/permanent categories of homoeroticism (p. 11).

Fran Martin does not, however, provide a complete history of homoeroticism in the twentieth century, but regards the 1920s and 1930s as the necessary background for a better understanding of the post-1970s developments, which are the main focus of her work. In her analysis, the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are perceived as three historically linked areas, but with various pluralities and different developments. Thus, Martin avoids any essentialized understanding of Chinese forms of homoeroticism as being fundamentally different from the West. After the mid-1980s, in particular, there was growing interest in the interaction in these three areas in the form of an exchange of popular texts, other media representations, and also of persons traveling more freely. Television and the World Wide Web, of course, played another important role (p. 21).

While the material employed by the author covers various forms of text and other media representations, a more concentrated focus is laid on the stories of school girl romances in order to illustrate the links between female sex-love and contemporary Chinese cultural life (p. 21).

This complex and demanding project is carried out in various stages: chapter 1, “Tragic Romance: The Chinese Going-In Story,” deals with short stories written in the 1920s and 1930s by Lu Yin, Ling Shuhua, and Yu Dafu. This was the time when the translocation, translation, and transculturation of Western sexual discourses to China took place, often via Japan, during the course of which Western discourses changed, were adapted, and transformed into new hybrid structures. Martin shows that “adjacency and interconnection” exist between various “Western” and “Asian” discourses, but that it would be wrong to assume the existence of an essentialist binary between the two (p. 31). In Martin’s view, the homoerotic schoolgirl and the tomboy were created during the 1920s, but then also survived to live on in contemporary China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

In chapter 2, “Voluble Ellipsis: Second-Wave Schoolgirl Romance in Taiwan and Hong Kong,” Martin analyses two fictional works, one by the Taiwanese author Chu T’ien-Hsien and the other by the Hong Kong author Wong Bikwan. Each of these novels makes specific reference to earlier works, such as those by Qiong Yao and Eileen Chang. Martin points out that these are not merely reproductions of heterosexualized romantic stories; these stories do not cite romantic heterosexual models, but create new forms and, therefore, also subversive forms of this genre. Interestingly enough, these two authors...