Producing Norms, Defining Beauty: The Role of Science in the Regulation of the Female Body and Sexuality in Liangyou and Furen Huabao Chapter uri icon

abstract

  • This chapter explores how Liangyou, and Furen huabao, the women's magazine run by Liangyou press, appropriated scientific discoveries, and how this scientific discourse contributed to new structures of knowledge, particularly new modes of writing about female sexuality and aesthetics of the female body in Republican China. Tani Barlow detects a particular mode of knowledge - which she terms "vernacular sociology" - that was deployed for self-expression by modernists in 1920s China. Dong Chuncai, author of the Tragedy of the Praying Mantis, is particularly concerned with the morality of human females. To Liangyou, the proper function of the new seeing devices is to serve as a highly efficient surveillance system, which helps to see better, know more about what lies beneath the beautiful surface, and therefore regulate women's behavior and looks.

author list (cited authors)

  • Lei, J.

citation count

  • 0

complete list of authors

  • Lei, Jun

editor list (cited editors)

  • Pickowicz, P., Shen, K., & Zhang, Y.

Book Title

  • Liangyou, Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Global Metropolis, 1926-1945

publication date

  • January 2013