Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary

by Fran Martin, Rey Chow, Harry Harootunian

Backward Glances reveals that the passionate love one woman feels for another occupies a position of unsuspected centrality in contemporary Chinese mass cultures. By examining representations of erotic and romantic love between women in popular films, elite and pulp fiction, and television dramas, Fran Martin shows how youthful same-sex love is often framed as a universal, even ennobling, feminine experience. She argues that a temporal logic dominates depictions of female homoeroticism, and she traces that logic across texts produced and consumed in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. Attentive to both transnational cultural flows and local particularities, Martin shows how loving relations between women in mass culture are usually represented as past experiences. Adult protagonists revel in the repeated, mournful narration of their memories. Yet these portrayals do not simply or finally consign the same-sex loving woman to the past—they also cause her to reappear ceaselessly in the present. As Martin explains, memorial schoolgirl love stories are popular throughout contemporary Chinese cultures. The same-sex attracted young woman appears in both openly homophobic and proudly queer-affirmative narratives, as well as in stories whose ideological valence is less immediately clear. Martin demonstrates that the stories, television programs, and films she analyzes are not idiosyncratic depictions of marginal figures, but manifestations of a broader, mainstream cultural preoccupation. Her investigation of representations of same-sex love between women sheds new light on contemporary Chinese understandings of sex, love, gender, marriage, and the cultural ordering of human life.

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Lesbian, China

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Bingqian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun thesis. I’ve learned loads of facts and info and gotten to read and watch a couple of stories and films mentioned in the book. Almost like attending a course called A Survey of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Female Homoerotic Literature. I like the non- identity approach. I like the expression female homoeroticism better than lesbianism. More or less unfortunately, the globalisation of Euro-American identity politics has been so ‘successful’ in the past decade that the binary of homo/heterosexuality is stronger perhaps than ever. You could hardly see the universalising perspective in Chinese Internet discussions now. Maybe to look back at the history where (temporary) homosexuality was relatively accepted is a better way to measure the same-sex romance in the Chinese-language context.

I’m not an expert in this field but it would be fun to bring Singapore and Malaysia to discussion, as they belong to the Chinese-speaking culture. It would also be fun to see comparison between the Korean and Chinese queer writing during a certain period (starting from 1900s). Impossibly huge work, but it should be very interesting to see how the two converged in the early 1920s and departed, especially to explore the intervening force of Japanese colonialism and the cultural history of Republic China era.

[93 Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of such great analysis, information and insights. Tons of books, TV shows, and movies which have made their way onto my watch/read list. Really makes you think on the West's normalization and labels of sexuality might be restrictive or impose a narrative which doesn't apply for everyone's experiences.