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Reviewed by:
  • Gender in Chinese Music ed. by Rachel Harris, Rowan Pease, and Shzr Ee Tan
  • Marc L. Moskowitz
Gender in Chinese Music. Ed. By Rachel Harris, Rowan Pease, and Shzr Ee Tan. pp. viii + 308. Eastman/Rochester Studies in Musicology (University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY and Woodbridge, 2013. £55. ISBN 978-1-58046-443-7.)

Gender in Chinese Music is an admirably ambitious volume that spans an impressive range of temporal and geographical axes, forcefully demonstrating the breathtaking range of musical traditions in the PRC. There are too [End Page 314] many gems in this book to address here so I will limit myself to presenting a few sample chapters, chosen in part with an aim to demonstrate the volume’s remarkable array of topics.

Tiantian Zheng’s chapter expertly links historical practices of gender construction among imperial Chinese courtesans with the contemporary setting of KTV (karaoke TV). In both worlds, women are presented as gendered objects of desire: their use of song in KTV aligns them lyrically with traditional roles of passive and subservient women, even as they control the thematic direction of the gendered narratives in choosing which songs to perform. Zheng points out that men also perform masculinity: in traditional China, elite men studied guidelines on how to be good patrons, while in contemporary China, the public performance of men as sexual consumers also plays an important part in their construction of masculinity among their peers.

Rachel Harris writes about Muslim Uyghur women in a rural area of the north-west region of China. It is an unusually reflexive and engaging piece that examines the gendered privileges of being a Westerner and the ways that marrying a Uyghur man brings her into the women’s sphere. She notes that as a British woman she is both female and other. She is accepted into the women’s sphere but she is also allowed to participate in behaviour, such as singing and playing music, in which most of the women are forbidden to partake. She then contrasts her own experiences with those of a famous female Uyghur singer to examine the ways in which the performer manages to maintain a respectable status in a realm that acknowledges her fame and skill while ‘decent’ women are forbidden public performance. Harris concludes the chapter by suggesting the possibility that women’s religious chants allow for the emotional expression that is denied them in other musical spheres.

Hwee-San Tan also deals with institutionalized liminality. In her study she examines Buddhist Vegetarian Sisters (caigu) in the Fujian province in the south of China. The vegetarian sisters perform funerary songs and their social position is somewhere between ordained nuns and lay Buddhists. They do not shave their heads and most are not ordained, but they do live in temples and forsake lay life. Unlike the other authors that I have presented here, Tan also explores specific details of melodic styles, providing the musical notes for one of the hymns (p. 278) and analysing the phrase and syllable count of the national and Fuzhou styles (p. 276).

Given the impressive coverage of the chapters, the book might have been better served had it been split into two discrete volumes. Slightly less than half of the chapters present interviews with no accompanying analysis. Each of the interviews is a few pages in length. They are engaging, but they are part of a very different genre from the academic analysis of the other chapters, and they rarely relate directly to them. At times there is a loose connection but one might suggest that, even then, their central components are too disparate to really be said to be complementary. Chapter 4, for example, presents an interview with a male karaoke bar host, which follows Tiantian Zheng’s chapter on karaoke hostess bars. The interview is most compelling in its depiction of border crossing and China’s political economy, whereas the preceding analytical chapter focuses on constructions of gender in imperial China and today.

For those who do want the fullest range possible, this book has much to offer. Both styles of chapters are extremely compelling. The interviews are presented with enough fluidity and grace that...

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