"Miss China" The Hypervisible Female Body on the Global Stage by Jiayun Zhuang-- CSW Update January 2007

"Miss China"

The Hypervisible Female Body on the Global Stage

by Jiayun Zhuang

Zhang Yimou announced, “The world gave me eight minutes and I will give the world a surprise.” (1) The noted filmmaker who directed Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, and the recently released Curse of the Golden Flower, was describing the eight-minute performance introducing the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—the host nation of the 2008 Olympics—that he directed for the closing ceremony of the Athens Olympics in August, 2004. In the performance, Yimou showcased a series of images of a grand and unified nation that bears a unique “Chineseness” which has supposedly lasted from ancient time to the modern era.

With no pretensions to complexity, the performance nonetheless enacts a short ethnographical report, revealing, once again, Zhang’s habitual invocation of male fantasies about women, as well as western fantasies about China. Scrutinizing each episode of the performance, however, I discern a paradigm about the continuous progression of China. A small girl represents a sweet and promising image of China’s future in the global arena. Gongfu demonstrations, spectacles from Peking opera, and stiltwalking–all performed by male actors–evoke an imaginary authentic ancientness of China. Situated rather confusingly within such representations is the opening, in which fourteen fine Chinese misses sing, dance, and play the melody of “Jasmine Flower” on traditional instruments. (2) The group seems to have nowhere to go, caught between a celebration of wild modern womanhood and a nostalgia for traditional femininity. Seeming to conjure up female festivity, the sequence simply enacts a masquerade for male desire. In my view, the dancing beauties can be taken as an exemplar of their place in the postsocialist and globalizing urban PRC, where programmed representations of femininity have been made into hypervisible and supersexual spectacles on a global stage.

Shifting away from the Olympic performance, I would now like to consider the term, or rather the trope, “Miss,” which signifies a certain identity and a new gendered representation in the present PRC. “Miss” (xiao jie) is an appellation that was nearly purged from the social vocabulary during what some would deem as the “puritanical” socialist epoch. In the drastically changing spatiotemporal landscape of today’s PRC, the promotion of the images of female as “Miss” and the re-employment of the term is an ironic social phenomenon that is closely associated with the booming gender industry and related professions both domestically and internationally. The Misses have come back and they have been caught up in a historical juncture wherein the exaggeration of gender difference and sexuality effectively serves the new global consumer culture.

Taking female “hypervisibility” as a starting point, I assert that since capital-driven globalization may well coexist with political nationalism in the present PRC, such coexistence is partially posited upon a gendered function assigned to the Chinese female body. That female body is turned into a bargaining chip in transnational trafficking. While the old desexualized and defeminized female model—Iron Maiden (tie guniang) (3)—that, like a loyal daughter, was recruited to represent socialist state projects in the era of Mao, the new market economy and consumer culture employs the “Misses” to promote a sexualized economy. Both images, the supersexualized and the more or less masculinized female body, are ultimately subordinate to the larger national project. Wiping away or emphasizing the visibility of the gendered body in the PRC secretly grounds an invisible “viewer” with its national subject-position and the male eye. Both the current transnational female “hypervisibility” and the former female “genderlessness” can be viewed as symptomatic and indicative of how a national gender order in the PRC results in an institutionalized exploitation and displacement of female embodiment and subjectivity. The gender construction of Chinese women are embedded and embodied in citizenship and nationalism, newly circulated through capitalist globalization. (4) The Hollywood film Geisha, which was subject to Chinese censorship because of the overvisibility of its Chinese actresses, and the “Miss China” crisis in Kabul, in which a group of prostitutes were accused by both sides, arrested, and deported, offer additional instances.

Tracing the female body in her managed visibility in representation and reality, we can explore what is hidden in those otherwise highly in/visible female bodies. In the context of globalization, the displacement of humanity, or, the increasingly visible maneuvered and capitalized female agency, can find a particularly indicative register in Chinese women, who have been placed on a new battlefield where the politically charged realities and consumable hyperrealities converge in the new gendered operation. Indeed, both the national market reform and globalization have offered Chinese women an unexpected opportunity to overtake Chinese society’s developmental level, while at the same time entering onto the global stage. The primary question is whether the process of Chinese women’s globalization will offer them—the Misses or the Iron Maidens—new opportunities to cast off the entanglements of nationalistic and patriarchal order. Or, will they simply be involved in another hegemonic social order, say, the capitalistic one?

NOTES
1. See “Zhang Yimou to Raise China Lantern in Athens” People’s Daily Online, August 26, 2004. http://english.people.com.cn/200408/26/eng20040826_154882.html

2. Jasmine Flower is a popular folksong of Jiangsu, China. The melody was turned into a central piece of music by Giacomo Puccini for his most popular opera Turandot. The fancy and expensive authentic Chinese mise-en-scène of “Turandot in the Forbidden City” in the summer of 1998 was directed by Zhang Yimou. The soft and gentle tune of Jasmine Flower is often associated with Chinese traditional femininity. The lyrics are: “Jasmine flower, such a beautiful flower, her sweet scent overwhelms all others in the garden. I want to pluck her for myself, but I am afraid of the garden’s keeper. Jasmine flower, such a beautiful flower, she is as white as snow when she is blooming. I want to pluck her for myself, but I am afraid of gossips around…”

3. With a desexualized look and strong build, Iron Maiden was declared by Mao Zedong as “holding up half the sky” and legitimized by the state-sponsored feminism from the very beginning of the establishment of the socialist China; it was a key sign of the institutionalized equality and the building of socialist nation-state in the 1950s and 1960s. Also see Yang Mayfair’s “From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women’s Public Sphere in China.” in Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) 35–67.

4. In the longer version of this paper, I actually touch on two huge topics: one is about former “socialist nationalism” and the other about “globally geared projects for consumption”. I mainly focus on the latter one. The earlier topic is one that has received a range of critical treatment from various perspectives and needs of course careful explorations, but it is not the focus of my paper.

Jiayun Zhuang (zhuangj@ucla.edu) is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Theater at UCLA. She is interested in both contemporary performance arts of China (including body art, site-specific performance, multimedia performance, and installation performance) and the transfiguration of performance space as new social space in urban China. She is currently writing her dissertation on “postsocialist” performance in urban China. She presented a version of this article at the 2006 Annual Women and Theatre Program of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference entitled “Displacements: Genealogies, Generations and Geopolitics.” A CSW Travel Grant helped defray her expenses.