The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (review)

Tze-lan D. Sang has traced the competing and shifting meanings of female-female relations in Chinese sources from the seventeenth century to the present. She has done this by offering a close reading of specific texts from what she has identified as key moments in the formation of these disparate meanings. The first of these moments is the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which yielded a rare exploration of female same-sex love in the fictional "records of the strange" by Pu Songling (1640-1715). The second is the Republican era (1912-49) and, specifically, the May Fourth period (roughly the mid-1910s through the mid-1920s), when female same-sex love became the subject of public, Western-influenced sexological and fictional discourse(s) for the first time in Chinese history. The third moment includes the last several decades of the twentieth century in mainland China and Taiwan, where transnational trends have again been crucial to the formation of female same-sex subjectivities through women's writing and, in Taiwan in particular, collective action.

The task Sang set for herself was an extremely ambitious one. She not only took on an imposing span of China's complex history but attempted to map largely uncharted terrain: while male homosexuality has been the subject of a number of historical and literary monographs, female homoeroticism has remained virgin territory. She successfully rose to these challenges. Her detailed contextualization of the moments on which the book focuses is exemplary, as is her command of a range of secondary literatures—from Western theories of sexuality to Chinese representations of erotic love in late imperial, Republican, and contemporary Chinese sources. Sang's analytical and writerly skills are most acute, however, when she is closely reading specific texts. Although she occasionally runs the risk of overdetermining the meaning of her materials as she gathers fragments of an at best disparate discourse, she is conscious of this risk. One may not be completely persuaded by all of her readings, but one can only respect the elegance and light-handedness with which she presents them.

The main argument of the book is that although female-female relations had been an integral part of Chinese erotic and romantic experience for centuries, they were not the subject of regulation or discussion in pre-twentieth-century Chinese texts because they posed no direct threat to the patriarchal order. A man could tolerate his wife's relationship with another woman, even the relationship between a gentry lady and a courtesan, as long as that relationship did not interfere with her normative domestic roles and responsibilities. On the rare occasions when such relationships were commented on in late imperial texts, they were trivialized and marginalized through the language of friendship and sisterhood.

The situation changed in the early twentieth century, when raising levels of education and professionalization gave women increased independence vis-à-vis the patriarchal order. Threatened by the possibility of female economic, erotic, and romantic autonomy, male May Fourth intellectuals drew on the Western sexological theories of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis among others in order to develop a new regulatory discourse on female sexuality. In the succeeding decades the authority of "modern science" was repeatedly used to define female same-sex love as a psychological or sexual perversion. The power of this discourse was evident in fictional writings by women of the period. While these writings tentatively introduced the subject of female same-sex love, they depicted it either as innocent—thus trivializing it once again—or depraved, in accordance with the prominent discourse of their day.

This tentativeness has been sustained in female fictional or autobiographical writings that explore the subject of lesbianism in the post-Mao People's Republic of China (from 1976) and post-martial law Taiwan (from 1987). The constraints are more keenly felt in mainland China where, despite the founding of a lesbian community newspaper, Tiankong, female...