Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society)

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. Backward Glances reveals that the passionate love of one woman 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. 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 Contents Acknowledgments Note on Translations and Transliterations Introduction: Love and Remembrance 1. Tragic Romance: The Chinese Going-In Story 2. Voluble Ellipsis: Second-Wave Schoolgirl Romance in Taiwan and Hong Kong 3. Postsocialist Melancholia: “Blue Sky Green Sea” 4. No Future: Tomboy Melodrama 5. Television as Public Mourning: Taiwan’s Sad Young Women 6. Critical Presentism: New Chinese Lesbian Cinema Epilogue Appendix: Interview with Shi Tou List of Chinese Characters Notes Filmography Selected Bibliography Index Tragic Romance : The Chinese Going-in Story -- Voluble Ellipsis : Second-wave Schoolgirl Romance In Taiwan And Hong Kong -- Postsocialist Melancholia : Blue Sky Green Sea -- No Future : Tomboy Melodrama -- Television As Public Mourning : Taiwan's Sad Young Women -- Critical Presentism : New Chinese Lesbian Cinema. Fran Martin. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Examining a broad range of media (texts, film, television soap operas, comics, pop music, internet) this book studies lesbian representation in the contemporary Chinese mass cultures that circulate between the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong An analysis of the dominant patterns in the representation of erotic and romantic love between women in contemporary film, television, and fiction from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.