Proletarian white and working bodies in Mao's China

Positions

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 361-393

  Chen, Tina Mai ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0042391507     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-11-2-361     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. Mao Zedong, "A Study of Physical Education" (April 1917), in Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912-1949, ed. Stuart Schram (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 1:119
2. On metonymic representation and displacement in the discourse of clothing, see Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983)
3. Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, Aesthetics, and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997)
4. Also see Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2000)
5. Scholars examining dress and body as cultural artifacts of Communist China address aesthetics, visual culture, clothing, and representation as well as bodily discipline and sport. The relationship between body and clothing in Maoist sociopolitical imagery has not received the same attention, however. See Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, eds., Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999)
6. Stefan R. Landsberger, Chinese Propaganda Posters (Amsterdam: Pepin, 1995)
7. Julia F. Andrews and Xiaomei Chen, eds., "Visual Culture and Memory in Modern China," Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12, no. 2 (fall 2000)
8. Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
9. Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick, Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress, and Body (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 7
10. Lee Wright refers to this phenomenon as "smallness." Wright argues that clothing that appears to be "too small" singles out parts of the body for display. She reminds us that "the smallness of a garment not only accentuates the body size and shape but can create an image of it being bigger. The iconoclasm is that smallness equals more not less, i.e. one gesture or detail can resignify the whole, and as such is a powerful and manipulative motif" (Lee Wright, "Outgrown Clothes for Grown-up People: Constructing a Theory of Fashion," in Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, ed. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992], 53)
11. On these parallel processes, see Tina Mai Chen, "Re-forming the Chinese National Body: Emulation Campaigns, Gendered Representation, and National Narrative in Early Maoist China" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1999)
12. Chen Ji, "Xin Zhongguo Diyi Nü Diaoduyuan" [New China's first female dispatcher], Xin Zhongguo Funü, June 1952, 30
13. The struggle with nature also is a common theme in reforming male bodies in the 1950s, particularly PLA and Chinese People's Volunteer soldiers (see Zhongguo Renmin Zhiyuanyun [Chinese People's Volunteer Army], A Volunteer Soldier's Day [1956; rpt., Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1961])
14. For more on female iconography, body types, and subjectivity, see Tina Mai Chen, "Female Icons, Feminist Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric and Women's Agency in 1950s China," Gender and History 15 (August 2003): 268-295
15. The emphasis on physical fitness as a measure of belonging characterizes CCP practice beginning with the Jiangxi Soviet. Fan Hong cites the memoirs of female soldiers that tell of exercise, sport, and training in their everyday lives, and she concludes that the "equality demanded by men required women to be fitter" (Fan Hong, Footbinding Feminism, and Freedom: The Liberation of Women's Bodies in Modern China [London: Frank Cass, 1997], 160-161)
16. For model women included in this category, see "Zhongguo 'Nüjie Diyi' mingdan," in Huaxia funü mingren cidian bian weihui, Huaxia Funü Mingren Cidian [Dictionary of famous Chinese women] (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1988), 56-60
17. On "gender erasure," see Mayfair Mei-hua Yang, "From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women's Public Sphere in China," in Spaces of Their Own: Women's Public Sphere in Transnational China, ed. Mayfair Mei-hua Yang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 35-67
18. Dorothy Ko notes that in progressive film and literature of the 1930s, bare feet signified manual labor, metonymic representation of the humanity and democracy of the working class, and critique of the urban bourgeoisie and materialism. See Dorothy Ko, "Jazzing into Modernity: High Heels, Platforms, and Lotus Shoes," in China Chic: East Meets West, ed. Valerie Steele and John S. Major (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 141-154
19. Also see Mao's focus on the head and waist in "The Women's Revolutionary Army" and "Do You Mean to Say That Walking Is Only for Men?" ( both 14 July 1919), in Schram, Mao's Road to Power, 353, 351
20. More generally on artistic representation, body, and self, see Mark Elvin, "Tales of Shen and Xin: Body-Person and Heart-Mind in China during the Last 150 Years," in Self As Body in Asian Theory and Practice, ed. Thomas P. Kasulis, Roger T. Ames, and Wimal Dissanayake (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 213-291
21. poster covers of Zhongguo Funü, "Yanzhe geminghua daolu fenyong qianjin" 3 [Follow the revolutionary road, forge ahead courageously], 1966
22. and "Geming de nüzhanshi shengchan de hongqishou" 9 [The revolution's female soldiers, production's red-banner pacesetters], 1965
23. W. J. F. Jenner, ed., China: A Photohistory, 1937-1987 (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 94-95
24. Zhongguo Qingnian bao, 2 October 1952
25. On the meaning and historical background of white uniforms in the West, particularly in the medical field, see Valerie Steele, "Dressing for Work," in Men and Women: Dressing the Part, ed. Claudia Bush Kidwell and Valerie Steele (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 73-77
26. Also see "New Year's Eve in a Collective Household" ["Jiti hu zhi chuxi zhi ye"] (Shanghai, 1977), reproduced in Evans and Donald, Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China, pl. 10
27. CCP policies in the 1950s subjected housework to continual recategorization. In reference to women in towns, the First National Congress of the Women's Federation in 1949 referred to women in the town as laodong funü (working women). This category included woman workers and housewives in workers' families. See the report of the fourth meeting of the executive committee of the All-China Women's Federation, Renmin ribao [People's daily], 2 January 1953
28. Hui Laoye, "Jianchi chanpinzhili de nü jianchayuan" [The female inspector who upholds factory standards], Xin Zhongguo Funü 3, 1956, 13
29. Xin Zhongguo Funü 5, 1963, inside cover
30. Zhongguo Qingnian bao, 9 January 1958
31. Dru C. Gladney, "Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/Minority Identities (in Dimensions of Ethnic and Cultural Nationalism in Asia - A Symposium)," Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1994): 92-123
32. For example, "Mao Visits an Experimental Farm" ["Mao zhuxi canguan shiyan tian"], printed in Zhongguo Qingnian bao, 16 January 1965
33. as well as "Chairman Mao Inspects the Guangdong Countryside" ["Mao zhuxi shicha guangdong nongcun"], reproduced in Evans and Donald, Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China, pl. 31
34. "Jiao Nianzhen zhen shi ge hao shaonian" [Jiao Nianzhen is truly a good youth], Zhongguo Qingnian bao, 4 November 1965
35. See Rene Burri's 1964 photograph of young pioneers in Shanghai in Jenner, China, 109