Happy Lunar New Year from the USC US-China Institute!
A Frenchman at the Chinese Opera Circa 1900
The Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University presents a talk with Andrea Goldman.
This talk adopts an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective to understand a formative moment in the construction of normative sexuality in early twentieth-century China. The window onto this transformation comes through a paired reading of Chen Sen’s 陳森 novel, Pinhua baojian 品花寶鑒 (1849) against the adaptation of the same story sixty-plus years later by the French interpreter-diplomat George Soulié de Morant (1878-1955). The first work portrays the homoerotic elegance that accompanied the opera demimonde in the Qing capital. The second marks the moment at which the refined culture of male-male commercial sex in China was recast as backward and tawdry. This collapse of the culture of homoerotic elegance, I will show, was a casualty of foreign aggression in China circa 1900. With attention to the scholarly literature on both gender and colonialism, this talk will offer a new transnational perspective on the construction of modern sexuality in China.
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