"Backward Glances" reveals that the passionate love one woman feels
for another occupies a position of unsuspected centrality in
contemporary Chinese mass cultures. By examining representations of
erotic and romantic love between women in popular films, elite and
pulp fiction, and television dramas, Fran Martin shows how youthful
same-sex love is often framed as a universal, even ennobling,
feminine experience. She argues that a temporal logic dominates
depictions of female homoeroticism, and she traces that logic
across texts produced and consumed in mainland China, Hong Kong,
and Taiwan during the twentieth century and the early twenty-first.
Attentive to both transnational cultural flows and local
particularities, Martin shows how loving relations between women in
mass culture are usually represented as past experiences. Adult
protagonists revel in the repeated, mournful narration of their
memories. Yet these portrayals do not simply or finally consign the
same-sex loving woman to the past--they also cause her to reappear
ceaselessly in the present.
As Martin explains, memorial schoolgirl love stories are popular
throughout contemporary Chinese cultures. The same-sex attracted
young woman appears in both openly homophobic and proudly
queer-affirmative narratives, as well as in stories whose
ideological valence is less immediately clear. Martin demonstrates
that the stories, television programs, and films she analyzes are
not idiosyncratic depictions of marginal figures, but
manifestations of a broader, mainstream cultural preoccupation. Her
investigation of representations of same-sex love between women
sheds new light on contemporary Chinese understandings of sex,
love, gender, marriage, and the cultural ordering of human
life.
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