scholarly journals “Queering” the Nation?

Prism ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-69
Author(s):  
Jasmine Yu-Hsing Chen
Keyword(s):  
Female Character ◽  
Male Character ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Martial Law ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Chinese Nationalism ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
Queer Performance

Abstract This article explores how gendered Chineseness is represented, circulated, and received in Huangmei musical films for audiences in martial-law Taiwan. Focusing on Love Eterne (1963), the analysis examines how theatrical impersonations in the film provided a “queer” social commentary on aspects of Chinese nationalism that conflicted with the Kuomintang's military masculinities. Love Eterne features dual layers of male impersonations: diegetically, the female character Zhu Yingtai masquerades as a man to attend school with other men; nondiegetically, the actress Ling Po performs the male character Liang Shanbo, Zhu's lover. In addition to the “queer” imagination generated by Ling's cross-dressing performance, the author considers how the feminine tone of Love Eterne allowed the Taiwanese audience to escape from masculine war preparations. Although the Kuomintang promoted Ling as a model patriotic actress, it was her background, similar to many Taiwanese adopted daughters, that attracted the most attention from female audiences. This female empathy and the queer subjectivity arguably disturbed the Kuomintang's political propaganda. Hence, this study adds to the breadth of queerness in studies on the cinematic performance of same-sex subjectivities and invites new understandings of queer performance in Love Eterne as a vehicle that can inspire alternative imaginings of gendered selfhoods and nations.

Romanticism and Gender Criticism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan J. Wolfson
Keyword(s):  
Gender Difference ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Criticism

Gender criticism, an evolution from feminist criticism, studies representations of gender and gender difference in literary representation and, more broadly, in the ‘social text’, the languages and systems of representation in culture at large. Gender language is conspicuous in the binaries masculine and feminine, allied to manly, unmanly, effeminate, boyish, girlish, womanish, womanly, etc. It also involves the complications and challenges to these binaries by same-sex associations and intimacies, ‘queer’ configurations (unreadable by traditional measures), trans- or fluid figures, and performativity in all these aspects – including ventures in cross-dressing or cross-living, closeted or coterie-identifiable. In the Romantic era, gender criticism suggests that the sex/gender coordinates male/masculine and female/feminine are historically specific determinations, not inevitabilities. This essay focuses on dismantling critiques and attendant reinforcements. Critique often takes the form of satires of the ‘feminine’ qualities of delicacy, sentiment, soft-headedness, and dependence, ‘girls’ for life, even in a adult woman’s body; it also satirizes masculine swagger and presumption. It becomes interested in aberrant but not necessarily stigmatized variants – say, the rational woman and the man who respects such a woman, without being unmanned. Traditional understandings get put into question and into play, with critical implications.

scholarly journals How Damsels Love: The Transgressive Pleasure of Romance

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 146-159
Author(s):  
Renata Elizabetta Ntelia
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Emotional Labor ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Female Character ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Psychological Dimension ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Male Discourse

In this article, I look at contemporary romances as a source of transgressive pleasure that may inspire its audience to reject patriarchy. I focus solely on romances between a man and a woman with emphasis on the psychological dimension of the female character upon her trajectory from an object of desire to the man’s ideal partner. I argue that the pleasure of romance is, indeed, a means towards the dismissal of patriarchy. Drawing on feminist theory, I contend that romance constitutes a nucleus of a feminine ideal that women may use as a comparative reference point for their real-life relationships, revealing any problematic and inadequate behavior of real-life partners. Even though romance pertains to the prescripts of patriarchy, I argue that it can be seen as an intertext: a product of the interlanguage used to translate the male discourse to the female bodily experience. In producing and consuming the romance, women can contrast this experience of the feminine ideal with the lack of pleasure patriarchy entails for them. In this respect, the romance possesses a transgressive power that may facilitate women’s realization of their dissatisfaction and the refusal of their role as emotional labor.

scholarly journals THE HUNGER GAMES IS A UTOPIA? THE FEMININE AS A BRIDGE TO THE RETURN TO NATURE IN CONTEMPORARY DYSTOPIA

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 743-758
Author(s):  
Ânderson Martins Pereira
Keyword(s):  
Female Character ◽  
Strong Bond ◽  
Hunger Games ◽  
The Hunger Games ◽  
The Feminine

ABSTRACT Contemporary dystopia has distinguished itself from the canonic texts of the genre since it has problematized technology and is permeated by posthumanism. This update in the dystopian genre has a utopic subtext within the narrative. In it, utopia is only achieved by a return to nature; such a connection between humanity and nature will only be restored by the feminine who will work as a bridge to a posthuman relation among species. This paper will start from the contributions of Derrida (1997, 2008), Dunja M. Mohr (2007), Rita Terezinha Schmidt (2017) and Cary Wolfe (2009) to analyze the trilogy Hunger Games (2008, 2009, 2010), aiming to discuss epistemologically the utopic subtext. The paper will show that Rue and Katniss will create a strong bond with nature, being the last female character responsible to lead society to a posthuman utopic place.

From Rags to Drag

Paracomedy ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 82-118
Author(s):  
Craig Jendza
Keyword(s):  
Male Character ◽  
Appropriate Use ◽  
Cross Dressing

This chapter proposes that for some twenty years, Aristophanes and Euripides were engaging in a cross-generic dialogue about the appropriate use and effectiveness of dramatic costuming, which concerned the costume choices of dressing a royal in rags and dressing a male character in women’s clothes. It argues that Aristophanes’s Acharnians caricatured Euripides’s tendency to stage heroes in rags and that some years later, Euripides’s Helen reacted by depicting Menelaus as Aristophanes’s caricature of a Euripidean hero in rags. The chapter then suggests that the following year, Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria mocked Euripides by dressing him, his Kinsman, and his fellow tragedian Agathon in women’s clothes and that Euripides’s Bacchae responded by making Pentheus participate in the same kind of cross-dressing scene that Aristophanes used in Women at the Thesmophoria. The chapter analyzes these reappropriations as a type of literary rivalry aimed at achieving poetic supremacy.

Same Sex Desire and Society in Taiwan, 1970–1987

2005 ◽  
Vol 181 ◽  
pp. 67-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Damm
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Chinese Mainland ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Strong Sense ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Martial Law ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
The Chinese Mainland ◽  
The One

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the discourses of same-sex desire which predominated in Taiwan in the two decades preceding the lifting of martial law in 1987. Using a poststructuralist, historical approach, it is shown that Taiwan – being on the one hand a society with a strong Chinese cultural heritage, but on the other a society which has developed a strong sense of selfidentity as a result of a history very different from that of the Chinese mainland during the last century – can provide valuable insights into the ways in which social developments, global interaction and intercultural influences have changed the discourse of same-sex desire. Within the framework of this approach, it will be shown that these changes, which contributed towards the liberalization and pluralization of Taiwanese society, began to take effect in the period just before the lifting of martial law.

Masculine Plural

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ingleheart
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Sexual Content ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Classical Education ◽  
Scholarly Article ◽  
Educational Establishment ◽  
Verse Drama ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
The Relationship

The Classics were core to the curriculum and ethos of the intensely homosocial Victorian and Edwardian public schools. Yet ancient homosexuality and erotic pedagogy were problematic to the educational establishment, which expurgated classical texts with sexual content. This volume analyses the intimate nexus between the Classics, sex, and education primarily through the figure of the schoolmaster Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge (1890–1918), whose clandestine writings explore homoerotic desires and comment on classical education. It reprints Bainbrigge’s surviving works: Achilles in Scyros (a verse drama featuring a cross-dressing Achilles and a Chorus of lesbian schoolgirls) and a Latin dialogue between schoolboys (with a translation by Jennifer Ingleheart). Like other similarly educated men of his era, Bainbrigge used Latin as an intimate homoerotic language; after reading Bainbrigge’s dialogue, A. E. Housman went on to write a scholarly article in Latin about ancient sexuality, Praefanda. This volume, therefore, also examines the parallel of Housman’s Praefanda, its knowing Latin, and bold challenge to mainstream morality. Bainbrigge’s works show the queer potential of Classics. His underground writings owe more to a sexualized Rome than an idealized Greece, offering a provocation to the study of Classical Reception and the history of sexuality. Bainbrigge refuses to apologize for homoerotic desire, celebrates the pleasures of sex, and disrupts mainstream ideas about the Classics and the relationship between ancient and modern. As this volume demonstrates, Rome is central to Queer Classics: it provided a male elite with a liberating erotic language, and offers a variety of models for same-sex desire.

Kunqu Cross-dressing as Artistic and/or Queer Performance

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph S. C. Lam
Keyword(s):  
Social Performance ◽  
Chinese Opera ◽  
Secular World ◽  
Performance Of Gender ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
Queer Performance ◽  
Peony Pavilion

Cross-dressing in kunqu, a classical genre of Chinese opera, as artistic and/or queer performance, may be understood through the Chinese aesthetic dyad of se (erotic charm) and yi (performance skill); these concepts complement or challenge international queer theories. The chapter surveys current debates about kunqu cross-dressing, illustrating with analysis of representative works/performances such as Jade Hairpin (Yuzanji), Peony Pavilion (Mudanting), and Yearning for the Secular World (Sifan) by leading impersonators like Banto Tamasaburo, Mei Lanfang, and Yue Meiti. Kunqu cross-dressing simultaneously confirms and challenges hegemonic Chinese notions of gender and sex, underscoring the need to investigate music as personal and/or social performance of gender and sex.

It’s a Man’s World: Cruising’s Hypermasculine Universe

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-50
Author(s):  
Eugenio Ercolani ◽  
Marcus Stiglegger
Keyword(s):  
Female Character ◽  
Male Sexuality ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Total Absence ◽  
The Social

This chapter analyses the masculinity present in Cruising and the subculture it sets out to describe: the communication codes, the language, and the near total absence of women. It taps into the social commentary Friedkin attempts to lay out regarding male sexuality and how it is externalized depending on context. Particular attention is given to Steve Burns and the plethora of men with whom he interacts. The chapter also focuses on the only fully fleshed-out female character present in the film, played by actress Karen Allen, whose career is taken into account and analysed.

scholarly journals A Male Transformation into a Female Character on the Noh Stage

Asian Studies ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-52
Author(s):  
Violetta BRAZHNIKOVA TSYBIZOVA
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Female Character ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
Female Roles ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Feminine Roles

Femininity and the feminine figure itself in Noh theatre plays an important role, though nowadays the interpreter is fundamentally masculine. The central aim of impersonating feminine roles by masculine performers, and therefore creating the masculine femininity consists of transmitting the spirit and the state of mind in place of ordinary copies of external femininity signs. That is the basis of the work of interpretation of the actor in the Noh theatre, similar in the case of both male and female roles. However, this paper will examine the technique in both occasions, and the difference in the event that there is a difference.

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