Women Playing Men: Same-Sex Relations in Republican Shanghai

The Harvard-Yenching Institute Presents a talk by Jiang Jin on the homosexual aspects in women's Yue opera against the background of the general Republican reformation of sex and gender relations.

A talk by Prof. Jiang Jin (Dept. of History, East China Normal University; Radcliffe Fellow in Residence and HYI Visiting Scholar 2011-12)

Discussant: Prof. Elizabeth Perry (Government Department, Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute)

Although we have pretty good knowledge about the homoerotic and homosocial world of Beijing opera of the late Qing, we know very little about the same-sex culture of women’s Yue opera that flourished in Republican Shanghai. This talk looks at the homosexual aspects in women’s Yue opera against the background of the general Republican reformation of sex and gender relations. By juxtaposing the opera’s stage representations of heterosexual love by the same-sex cast with the off-stage homoerotic and homosocial relationships within women's opera circles, we will explore a spectrum of possibilities for women in Republican-era Shanghai.

Co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies