Normativizing Heterosexuality:
The Chinese "Modern Girl" in the 1920s and 30s

by Tze-lan Deborah Sang

Tuesday, March 20, 2007
4:00pm-6:00 pm, 2239 Lane Hall

In this talk Sang examines the Chinese modern girl in the 1920s and 1930s, a chameleon-like figure that appeared in a wide variety of representations. In particular, she explores how the modern girl image got inflected or transformed when it passed from both modernist and elite leftist discourses into middle-brow and reputedly conservative urban fiction. She is interested in not only the global circulation of this highly mobile image, but also its re-inscriptions cross class lines within China. She argues that public fascination with the modern girl played a significant role in normativizing heterosexuality not only among the middle class but also in the lower social strata.

Tze-Lan Deborah Sang is Associate Professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon. She is the author of The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (Chicago, 2003), which is the first monograph to trace the formation of new female identities organized by same-sex desire during China's transition from empire to modernity.

Open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

For further information, contact Ying Zhang: yingaa@umich.edu .

Sponsors: The East Asian Gender Forum, The Global Turns and Gender Returns Program, and the Women's Studies Department.