Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures (review)

To debate and discuss on the issue of modernity in contemporary China has become an academic fashion in recent years. Scholars often quote such important Western works as Habermas's The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987), Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1980), Giddens's The Consequences of Modernity (1990), Appadurai's Modernity at Large (1993), Calinescu's Five Faces of Modernity (1987), and Jameson's A Singular Modernity (2002), since most of them are available in Chinese. But all of the aforementioned books only deal with a "singular" modernity, or more precisely, a Western modernity, and almost none of them have touched upon the modernity of the "other," or a more specifically Chinese modernity, even though some of these Western scholars are really interested in China and even frequently quoted and discussed in the Chinese context. In this aspect, the publication of Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures edited by Fran Martin and Larissa Heinrich, which has not only deconstructed the "singular" (Western) modernity with metamorphosed Chinese practices but also filled a gap in the study of Chinese modernity or modernities, is timely. The essays in this anthology deal in a substantial way with such cutting-edge issues as those of gender, body and identity—textually as well as visually—by pointing them to ordinary people's daily practices rather than merely elite literature and art. What impresses readers most profoundly is the title, "embodied modernities," which is no longer the modernity discussed in scholars' books or academic conferences theoretically, but rather very concretely, and even corporeally, represented or "embodied" in identity, gender, and body studies. In this aspect, this anthology also plays the role of writing a history of China's body or gender studies by referring to its multiplied "modernities" and identities.

The volume is composed of two parts, with fourteen chapters total: six dealing with "Thresholds of Modernity," that is, modernity in the pre-1949 period, and eight discussing "Contemporary Embodiments" from 1980 to the present century. The former describes the radical transformation of body in a social, political, and cultural context, and the latter presents us with a picture of how the embodiment and representation of body have evolved in an increasingly modernized and globalized society.

The essays in the entire volume covers numerous aspects of Chinese modernities: from its abandoning of women's footbinding to the evolution of crossdressing in traditional and modern Chinese theater and the transgender body in the novel, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, etc.; the organ trade described in contemporary Chinese literature and art; the new incarnation of female politicians in contemporary China; lesbian phenomena and their representation in Taiwanese visual culture today; and Hong Kong's diasporic and transnational incorporations of different modernities in media representations. In speaking of its relevance to today's theoretic debate and cultural studies, I think the second part is more valuable, although it is bit shorter and incomplete.

Just as the editors state, the anthology "presents a critical treatment of corporeality and representation in Chinese contexts in the light of recent transformations in culture, technology, and body scholarship" (5). It is true that the essays collectively "offer a wide-ranging exploration of what embodiment means in the context of increasingly fractal understandings of Chinese identity" (5). Obviously, the focus of all the essays is body representation in literature and art as well as other forms of visual culture, through which one can easily find the "modernization" and evolution of this sort of body representation in different periods of time and different regions of greater China.

If, as the editors describe, the first part explores representations of corporeality amidst the political and social turmoil of pre-1949 Chinese modernity, the second part leads readers to a period of "rapidly transforming corporeal imaginaries of the late modern period" (115), which is characterized by a certain "postmodernity" or multiplied and fragmentary "modernities." Although in the general Chinese condition, modernity is still a "borrowed" cultural "other" from the...