Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (review)

Reviews 429 Gail Hershatter. Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth -Century Shanghai. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997. xii, 591 pp. Hardcover $45.00, isbn 510-642-4562. The five hundred ninety-one pages—including one hundred thirty-nine pages of endnotes—ofmeticulously researched and tighdy narrated historical, sociological, literary, and cultural arguments and perspectives that are found in Gail Hershatter 's new book are the outcome ofa decade ofscholarly endeavor. Eight essays that have been published over the years reflect different stages ofinvestigation that have allowed Hershatter to define, refine, and redefine her interpretations. This book shows the imprint of a long history in the making: in the copiousness of documentation and the depth and breadth ofthe themes that thread themselves through this expansive study. A narrative of native and foreign narratives of the commerce and culture of prostitution in Shanghai (spanning the period between late nineteenth-century imperial Qing society and the reforming, modernizing society of the present), this study is also a chronicle ofnation-building, a treatise on discourses over the moral and ideological health of the Chinese nation and its place in the postcolonial world order. Discussions ofmethodological and intellectual issues frame a three-part treatment ofprostitution as a masculinist and patriarchal construct, and a feminine cross, of"pleasure" and "danger" and ofvariously situated historical "interventions " that have responded through diverse agendas and strategies, with varying degrees ofeffectiveness, to real and imagined collective moral crises. The final part places prostitution and prostitutes in a contemporary discourse on nationbuilding , national identity, and modernization that carries me dissonance ofvoices suggestive of the increasing intellectual and social pluralism of Chinese society, and ofa continued perplexity over its enduring presence in post-Maoist society. It is the purpose ofthis ambitious study to recover and reconstruct a history that is massively documented and interpreted as well as repressed and "written between the lines."1 A historian who takes the history of gendered sexuality—its institution, its abolition, and its reemergence into the public space—and the privatization of Chinese women's sexual usage and brings to bear upon these things the overarching narrations ofnational, collective, and masculinist preoccupations is faced with one central perturbation: how can the scholar's master narrative© 1998 by University reach into, without being overwhelmed by, the emphases and forgetfulness ofreofHawai 'i Presspresentations such as are engendered bythe perspectives and interests ofthe many authorial voices that supply the rich source materials for Hershatter's study? 430 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 Prostitution and prostitutes, institution and inhabitants, structure and agency, and narratives and voice are the bipolar tensions that challenge the author , and thus the reader, throughout this work. The reader is always present. Indeed , the tenuous relationship between the narrated subjects, their conflicting representations, the identity of the master narrator, and what Hershatter refers to as "ourselves" (which the references in various passages reveal to be, most importandy , feminists) is never far from the author's consciousness. Hershatter sets herselfthe goal ofproducing "an imaginative reconstruction of the lives of Shanghai prostitutes from the late nineteenth century to the present" (p. 3). The first part of the book sets out the epistemological and methodological challenges that arise from the nature of the subject. Prostitutes, writes Hershatter, were "entered into the historical record when someone wanted to appreciate , castigate, count, regulate, cure, pathologize, warn about, rescue, eliminate , or deploy them as a symbol in a larger social panorama" (p. 3). Shanghai's abundant production ofboth literary and popular writings makes for an impressive array of source materials. One-hundred thirty-nine pages of endnotes and twenty-seven pages of bibliography testify to the author's thoroughness: The sources that document their existence are varied, and include but are not limited to guidebooks to the pleasure quarters; collections of anecdotes, portraits , and poetry to and by high-class courtesans, gossip columns devoted to courtesans in the tabloid press; municipal regulations prohibiting street soliciting ; police interrogations of streetwalkers and those accused of trafficking in women; newspaper reports of court cases involving both courtesans and streetwalkers; polemics by Chinese and foreign reformers arguing the merits of licensing versus abolition; learned articles by...