Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-m6qld Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-08T10:38:17.388Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

24 - Sex in Shanghai in the Twentieth Century: Intimate Negotiations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2024

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Mathew Kuefler
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
Get access

Summary

Shanghai is often seen as the exemplar of Chinese cosmopolitan modernity, including gender and sexual progressiveness under Western influence. This chapter argues that Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism is also rooted in migration, activism, and state policies. The early reforms of patrilineage coincided with influxes of migrants and refugees, who constituted the majority of Shanghai’s urban population. As the hotspot for China’s industrialization, women’s economic empowerment and social activism occurred almost simultaneously. The semi-colonial status of Shanghai before 1949 that protected groups such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in extra-territorialities also made possible the survival of sexual minorities. These historical and social conditions created an urban environment that has made negotiations of the most intimate aspects of human life both possible and difficult. Shanghai as the pioneer of gender equality and sexual modernity in China must be viewed through those intimate negotiations, in which people transform the definitions of freedom, belonging, and modernity.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Further Reading

Bao, Hongwei. Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Chen, Pi-Chao. ‘China’s Birth Control Action Programme, 1956–1964’. Population Studies: A Journal of Demography 24, no. 2 (1970): 141–58.Google ScholarPubMed
Chen, Tina Mai.Female Icons, Feminist Iconography? Socialist Rhetoric and Women’s Agency in 1950s China’. Gender and History 15, no. 2 (2003): 268–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheung, Pui-lam. ‘Sexual Culture and Periodical Publication: A Case Study of Ling Long, 1931–1937’. Research on Women in Modern Chinese History 25 (2015): 117–92.Google Scholar
Chia, Joy L.LGBTQ Rights in China: Movement-Building in Uncertain Times’. In Handbook on Human Rights in China, ed. Biddulph, Sarah and Rosenzweig, Joshua, 657–80. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2019.Google Scholar
Chiang, Howard. ‘Epidemic Modernity and the Emergence of Homosexuality in China’. Gender and History 22, no. 3 (2010): 629–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dong, Zhujun. Wo de yi ge shiji 我的一個世紀 (My Century). Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1997.Google Scholar
Duckett, Jane. ‘Neoliberalism, Authoritarian Politics and Social Policy in China’. Development and Change 51, no. 2 (2020): 523–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Faure, David. Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Gao, James Z.Eating, Cooking and Shanghai “Less-Manly Men”: Social Consequence of the Food Rationing and Economic Reforms’. Frontiers of History in China 8, no. 2 (2013): 259–93.Google Scholar
Guo, Ting. ‘Politics of Love: Love as a Religious and Political Discourse in Modern China through the Lens of Political Leaders’. Critical Research on Religion 8, no. 1 (2020): 3952.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henriot, Christian. Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History, 1849–1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Honig, Emily. Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850–1980. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Honig, Emily Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kam, Lucetta. Shanghai Lalas: Female Tongzhi Community in Urban China. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Smith, Steve. ‘Class and Gender: Women’s Strikes in St Petersburg, 1895–1917 and in Shanghai, 1895–1927’. Social History 19, no. 2 (1994): 141–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szonyi, Michael. Practicing Kinship: Strategies of Descent and Lineage in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wang, Zheng. Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1964. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Wasserstrom, Jeff. Global Shanghai, 1850–2010: A History in Fragments. London: Routledge, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, Tyrene. China’s Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the People’s Republic, 1949–2005. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Yan, Yunxiang. Private Life under Socialism Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Yana, Mimi, ‘Qiangjiu duanceng de shinian Zhongguo nvquan yundongshi’ 搶救斷層的十年中國女權運動史 (‘Rescuing the Interrupted Decade of Feminist Activism in China’). Wainao Me, www.wainao.me/wainao-reads/fea-Mar-feminist-cn.Google Scholar
Yang, Shen, and Lai, Jiang. ‘Labor Market Outcomes of Professional Women with Two Children after the One-Child Policy in China’. Journal of Social Issues 76, no. 3 (2020): 632–58.Google Scholar
Ye, Zhou. ‘Improving Clan: Clan Society in Modern Shanghai’. Shilin 4 (2020): 36–7.Google Scholar
Ye, ZhouModern Improvements of Genealogy in South Jiangsu’. Journal of Jiangnan University 14, no. 3 (2015): 49.Google Scholar
Yeh, Wen-hsin. ‘Shanghai Modernity: Commerce and Culture in a Republican City’. China Quarterly, no. 150 (1997): 375–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhang, Chenchen. ‘Governing Neoliberal Authoritarian Citizenship: Theorizing Hukou and the Changing Mobility Regime in China’. Citizenship Studies 22, no. 8 (2018): 855–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×