For the first time, this volume brings to the study of China the theoretical concerns and methods of contemporary critical cultural studies. Written by historians, art historians, anthropologists, and literary critics who came of age after the People's Republic resumed scholarly ties with the United States, these essays yield valuable new insights not only for China studies but also, by extension, for non-Asian cultural criticism.

Contributors investigate problems of bodiliness, engendered subjectivities, and discourses of power through a variety of sources that include written texts, paintings, buildings, interviews, and observations. Taken together, the essays show that bodies in China have been classified, represented, discussed, ritualized, gendered, and eroticized in ways as rich and multiple as those described in critical histories of the West. Silk robes, rocks, winds, gestures of bowing, yin yang hierarchies, and cross-dressing have helped create experiences of the body specific to Chinese historical life. By pointing to multiple examples of reimagining subjectivity and renegotiating power, the essays encourage scholars to avoid making broad generalizations about China and to rethink traditional notions of power, subject, and bodiliness in light of actual Chinese practices. Body, Subject, and Power in China is at once an example of the changing face of China studies and a work of importance to the entire discipline of cultural studies.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Body, Subject, and Power in China

Angela Zito, Tani E. Barlow.

1: The Imagination of Winds and the Development of the Chinese Conception of the Body

Shigehisa Kuriyama

2: The Body Invisible in Chinese Art?

John Hay

3: Multiplicity, Point of View, and Responsibility in Traditional Chinese Healing

Judith Farquhar

4: Silk and Skin: Significant Boundaries

Angela Zito

5: The Politicized Body

Ann Anagnost

6: The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: Manchuria in Xiao Hong's Field of Life and Death

Lydia H. Liu

7: Sovereignty and Subject: Constituting Relationships of Power in Qing Guest Ritual

James L. Hevia

8: (Re)inventing Li: Koutou and Subjectification in Rural Shandong

Andrew Kipnis

9: The Classic "Beauty-Scholar" Romance and the Superiority of the Talented Woman

Keith McMahon

10: Theorizing Woman: Funu, Guojia, Jiating

Tani E. Barlow

Glossary of Chinese Characters

List of Contributors

Index

Angela Zito is assistant Professor of Chinese religion at Barnard College of Columbia University, has published articles on ritual and power in Chinese society.

Tani E. Barlow is associate Professor of history at San Francisco State University and senior editor of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique. Her recent book is imagining women: Dingling and the category woman in Chinese modernity (Duke UP) rethinks gender history in the revolutionary period.