The Gender of Superstition: Revolutionary Modernity and the Yan’an Campaign against Spirit Mediums, 1944-1945

The Sigur Center for Asian Studies welcomes Dr. Xiaofei Kang for a public talk.

Although anti-superstition rhetoric has been a mainstay of the Communist discourse of Chinese modernity, the Chinese Communist Party did not launch an anti-superstition campaign until the late years of the Yan’an period, from 1944 to 1945, and it mainly targeted male spirit mediums. The campaign demonstrated significant developments in the CCP’s state-building power against its Nationalists rivals and in its effort to transform the Chinese peasantry for political membership in a new Communist social order. This presentation analyzes gendered representations of superstition in the campaign propaganda of this period. It argues that the CCP deployed both Marxist class ideology and May Fourth ideals of science and secularism not only to reform local religious practice but to establish a hegemonic masculinity for the party-state as means of legitimization. Spirit mediums, as well as the traditional ritual order they embodied, were attacked as a flawed masculine power and thereby subjected to feminization and emasculation. The staged fights of these two opposing male forces over a rural and suffering female body in the campaign propaganda enabled the party-state’s domination of superstitious manhood and hence its claim to be a superior modernizing and masculine force that both represented and stood above the people. As CCP policy in the Yan’an period foreshadowed the social, political and cultural programs of the Mao era, a critical reading of the gender dynamics of the Yan’an anti-superstition campaign offers important insights into the gender of modernity in the Maoist revolution and beyond.

Xiaofei Kang (Ph.D, Columbia, M.A, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, B.A, M.A, Beijing University) is Associate Professor of Religion at the George Washington University. She is the author of The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2006). She has published a number of articles on gender, ethnicity and religion and is a co-editor of Gendering Chinese Religion: Subject, Identity and Body (State University of New York Press, 2014). She is finishing a collaborative book project on religion, ethnicity and tourism on the Sino-Tibetan borderlands and has begun to work on a new project on gender, religion and twentieth-century Communist revolution in China.