BR - Embodied modernities

in demographic analysis. Discussions and interpretations are slightly inconsistent among chapters and possibly restricted to the authors’ professional backgrounds. In a collective work like this, such a problem is understandable considering the lack of established study in Asian medical history. In some ways the book could have been better co-ordinated. Although the editors provide excellent introductions linking the discussions in each chapter, the viewpoints and explanations are not fully integrated. For example, three chapters mention that the Chinese migrations to Hong Kong, East Timor and Singapore were seen by local authorities as major sources of certain diseases. However, the authors do not cross-reference these statements and occasionally fail to counter the impression prevalent in the West until the early 20th century of ‘‘the filthy Chinese’’. Also, in chapter two, the role of Japanese colonization in promoting modern medicine in East Asia is vague. Anyone who has read AnElissa Lucas’s Chinese Medical Modernization (Greenwood Press, 1982) will note the omission of many Japanese-educated Chinese students, like the famous Lu Xun, in the medical reforms in 1930s China. Chapter ten has a similar deficiency, lacking any discussion of Wu Lien-teh, a Singaporean Chinese and a plague-fighter in China. Dr Wu’s career and medical background constitute an interesting link between British colonial medicine in Singapore and the development of modern public health infrastructure in China. Another common problem is the definition of ‘‘traditional medicine.’’ Many contributors who discuss traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) do not distinguish orthodox TCM from Chinese folk medicine and common herbal remedies. While TCM is portrayed as an elite medicine in Korea in chapter three, the authors of other chapters tend to treat it as backward, in contrast to modern Western medicine. Moreover, the important term weisheng (wi-saeng in Korean) is often overlooked or treated differently in different contexts, which undermines the editors’ effort to integrate the discussions. Editing collective works into a comprehensive monograph is undeniably challenging, especially in a case like this when scholarship on Asian medical history is still young. Among the 14 chapters, only chapter four, about India, enjoys a thorough list of references. The other chapters list original materials with fragments of irrelevant second-hand research. Despite the minor problems mentioned above, in sum, far from being narrow, specialized, and technical, as the field of the history of public health might seem to be, this book contains a breadth of sources in a variety of languages, and integration of the local with the general renders Public Health in Asia and the Pacific a fascinating study for an unusually wide range of international scholarly audiences. This book may well be the pioneer in putting the history of public health in Asia and the Pacific ‘‘on the map.’’ SHI -YUNG LIU Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures E d i t e d b y F RAN MAR T I N a n d L A R I S S A ME I N R I C H Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2006 x + 290 pp. $48.00 ISBN 0-8248-2963-8 doi:10.1017/S0305741008000271 ‘‘Body studies’’ have featured in Chinese studies scholarship for some time now, in fields such as history, medicine, philosophy and visual culture. However, the editors of this volume attempt to place the study of the body in a new 190 The China Quarterly, 193, March 2008, pp. 172–206 interdisciplinary context, that engages with recent post-modernist debates about the formation of non-Western modernities in colonial and postcolonial societies. The book’s two sections roughly correspond with the late Qing/early Republican period, and the post-Mao decades. Starting the first, Angela Zito’s chapter on the representation of footbinding argues that the ‘‘fetishized’’ image of the bound foot in European missionary women’s critiques of the practice functioned as the repository for anxieties that corresponded less with the experiences of the women subjected by the practice than with the cultural concerns of the critics themselves. The distinctive meanings of the bound foot – for example as a ritualized marker of gentility and civility – was obscured from Western missionary understanding of China’s cultural difference. The modernizing anxieties of Chinese intellectuals were also responsible for cultural erasures, as Cuncun Wu and Mark Stevenson’s analysis of the xianggong reveals. From the mid- to late Qing, xianggong was the name given to the cross- dressing boy actor who took on the female (dan) roles of Beijing opera and who was also available as a male same-sex prostitute. The homoerotic sensibilities associated with the xianggong had long exercised a powerful cultural influence on the style of Beijing opera and the practices of same-sex male prostitution operating through the theatre world. However, by the early Republic, the xianggong had effectively disappeared, unable to withstand the intellectual onslaught of a modernizing discourse that sought to regulate sexual activities through modern ‘‘Western’’ distinctions between the normal and the deviant, and that was unable to accommodate a homoerotic body that appealed to passions and terms outside its modernizing vision. In the third chapter, Maram Epstein examines the popularity of a 1929 abridged revision of a hitherto marginal 18th-century novel, Yesou pusan (A Rustic’s Words of Exposure). The revised version appears as a vehicle of changing conceptualizations of sex, gender and the body in which ‘‘modern’’ ideas about the body, including an increasing emphasis on the sexed body as an aspect of masculine identity, intersect with late-imperial ideas, challenging common divisions drawn between modernizing and pre-modern discourses. John Zou then offers a provocative interpretation of the Communist state’s curiously laudatory treatment of famous dan opera singer, Mei Lanfang. He argues that the irony of the Communist regime’s cult of Mei Lanfang can be unravelled as a symbolic affirmation of the social and political identity of the ‘‘unclothed and essential’’ masculine subject. Tze-lan D. Sang ends the section with a discussion about the transgender quality of body of Yu Jiaolong, the heroine of Wang Dulu’s serialized novel Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In contrast with the film, the novel offers a glimpse of a body that, Sang argues, is at once more radical and provocative in its queer possibilities, than the heternormative construction of Ang Lee’s celebrated film adaptation would suggest. These initial chapters offer insights into the participation of local cultural practitioners in constructing meanings of the body that have eluded mainstream discussions about China’s modernity. In contrast, the second section shifts its focus to the ‘‘rapidly transforming corporeal imaginaries’’ of the high-tech media and consumer culture of the post-1980s decades, across different ‘‘Chinese’’ locations: the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Chinese diasporas. The overriding theme here is of the fragmented nature of the modern body – the ‘‘notable wane of corporeal presence’’ in texts that ostensibly deal with it (p. 120). The use of organ transplantation and radical surgeries in contemporary literature and art functions allegorically as a means of questioning the meaning of individual identity at a time when the body is given a high market value in diverse forms. The gendered body also appears as a site of negotiation, in the unlikely figure of Wu Yi, China’s best known Book Reviews 191 female politician. Louise Edwards argues that through her dress and her public self- representation, Wu forges a path between the masculinized official femininities of the Cultural Revolution era and the sexualized femininities of contemporary consumer culture, refusing simple identification with a fixed gender position. Fran Martin addresses a gender negotiation of a more apparently painful kind, in her analysis of the stigmatic body in the work of Taiwan’s lesbian writer Qiu Miaojing. For Qiu, the body emerges as the often out-of-control vehicle for the expression of the difficulties the female subject faced in elaborating ‘‘counternormative forms of gender and sexuality’’ in Taiwan in the early 1990s (p. 191). Teri de Silvio addresses the de- composition of the modern body in the information culture of post-millennial Taiwan through a fascinating ethnographic study of the largely female fans of a digital video puppetry serial. She links the fans who dress up as the puppets starring in the serials with the ritual performances of Imperial culture, in a move that implicitly rejects the corporeal subject of 20th-century modernity. Conventional categories of the body and gender are also disturbed, as Chris Berry argues, in the stellar image of Bruce Lee. Contrary to received 1970s martial arts movies wisdom, Lee’s body suggests subversive queer and postcolonial contestations of ‘‘neo-wu masculinity’’ overlooked in mainstream characterizations of his films within the 1970s martial arts film tradition. Lee’s body becomes the vehicle for the assertion of power, and in gay appropriations, as an object of desire, but in which homophobia is simultaneously produced through racialized structures of meaning that equate the ‘‘fag with Chineseness and ideal masculinity with a homophobic America’’ (p. 233). Towards the end of this volume, Olivia Khoo reflects on the ‘‘spectral body’’ of Wong-Kar Wai’s famous film, In the Mood for Love, through Derrida’s gloss on the ‘‘specter [as] the frequency of a certain visibility’’ between the material and ontological world, yet which by definition belongs to neither. This collection could be thought of in parallel terms: the bodies of its attention are certainly corporeal entities, yet their material and ontological status is endlessly deferred by the contexts of their production, reception and interpretation. Across its diverse themes and scholarly approaches, and its shifts between the substantial and insubstantial, it has a seductive but also problematic appeal. It invites the reader to reflect on the body as an immensely rich theme of enquiry for a wide range of social and cultural issues. Yet, the form and presence of the body that is here discussed is often exclusive. Where, for example, is the body that belongs to experiences and discourses beyond those of urban elites? Where is the body as a signifier of exclusion and disadvantage in social and political as well as sexual and gendered terms? And does the implicit contrast between the de-composing figures of the late Imperial/early Republican period and the fragmented bodies of the post-1980s period implicitly ascribe an unproblematized status to the uniform collective body assumed to characterize the Mao era? The editors of this volume have well demonstrated some of the diverse analytical possibilities of an entity that is still too often ascribed an assumed status. It remains to others to follow this volume through with enquiry about the status of bodies in temporal and cultural fields that address the ordinary and mundane as well as the queer and transgressive in contrasting versions of China’s 20th-century modernities. HARRIET EVANS 192 The China Quarterly, 193, March 2008, pp. 172–206