Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press by Joan Judge (review)

This is a comprehensive and groundbreaking study of the first commercial woman’s journal in Republican China, Funü shibao (Women’s Eastern Times), a journal born in the context of rapid growth of printed mass media and increasing social concerns for women’s issues. The concern for people’s quotidian lives, the attention to often-mischaracterized early Republican China, and the ambition of excavating women’s historical roles and the dynamic process of their subject-formation all together make Funü shibao a valuable research object. This book marks a new achievement with combined approaches of new cultural history and women’s studies.

With the purpose of “retrieval, redemption, and revalorization” (p. 5), Joan Judge fully demonstrates how Funü shibao developed “a new epistemology and a new politics grounded in everyday experience” (p. 1). She cogently argues that this journal was not “fully commercial” (p. 3). Instead, it was an important site of intellectual debates and political interventions. As a salient discursive and visual field, Funü shibao offers a window to observe the complicated, mixed, and transitional nature of the early Republic. By exploring new modes of readership and authorship as well as new bodies of knowledge promoted and produced by this journal, Judge scrutinizes the social and gendered changes of the 1910s and analyzes the formation of female subjectivities. She argues that by discussing women’s issues and encouraging active engagement of female readers, this journal acted as a vital platform for the discursive formation of “Republication ladies,” namely educated female elites.

One methodological contribution of this book is how to read visual materials, such as cover art, photographs, paintings, and illustrative diagrams. By reading its images analytically in their particular historical context, Joan Judge discovers the “visual avant-garde” (p. 43) role of Funü shibao in advancing the public recognition of a female community in the making. She further sheds light on how notions of body and health were formulated and disputed, and how female sexuality was coded and shifted.

More importantly, Republican Lens launches a strong critique to lingering New Culturalist discourse on cultural productions in early Republic China, especially the mischaracterization of Funü shibao as either “frivolous, didactic, conservative, salacious” (p. 5) or “apolitical, inoffensive” (p. 47). It challenges the epistemological paradigm of seeing May Fourth as the only critical period of Chinese modernity. It demonstrates a continuous endeavor of problematizing and investigating Chinese modernity by putting up two very useful and closely related analytical categories—“everydayness” and “experience.”

In her two published papers, “Everydayness as a Critical Category of Gender Analysis: The Case of Funü shibao (The Women’s Eastern Times)” (Jindai Zhongguo funüshi yanjiu, Vol. 20 [2012], pp. 1–28) and “Sinology, Feminist History, and Everydayness in the Early Republican Periodical Press” (Signs, Vol. 40, No. 3 [2015], pp. 563–587), Judge contends that “everydayness,” different aspects of daily life of ordinary people, is a more productive category of gender analysis in studying late Qing and early Republic print materials than nationalism and feminism. This category provides a microscopic lens onto disjunctions, contradictions, and tensions reflected by print media, and therefore onto the ambivalence and complexity of the early Republic. The effectiveness of “everydayness” as an analytical tool to reexamine Chinese modernity stems from two aspects: first, as space with inherent incompleteness and repetition, everydayness helps avoid seeing modernity as a single and linear totality; second, everydayness provides local conditions where modernity is staged, entangled, and materialized. It therefore serves as a powerful tool to study the multilayered process of actualizing modernity under particular conditions. “Everydayness” is also the very realm where new knowledge is constructed and praxis undertaken; it therefore helps to look into specific historical transformations. In this book, Judge discovers an “everyday agenda” of Funü shibao, that is, “to disseminate knowledge derived from and necessary for the conduct of daily life” (p. 8). She finds out that the “quotidian politics” promoted by...