Optical Scientism

Abstract

This chapter continues to address native male cultural producers’ fear and desire of transgressive modern women and their tactics of mitigating such fear and desire. It focuses on analysis of visuals in Shanghai pictorial magazines such as Liangyou, Linglong, Furen huabao, and expanding the discussion to include varied images of modern women and a larger range of male cultural producers with different political agendas. It draws particular attention to male editorial authority as well as male authorial agency behind visual representations of modern women. Male editorial authority intervened in the publication’s rhetoric, its technologies, and its representations of women, to ensure that the display of knowledge in images of women conformed to the gender ideologies of the magazines and functioned to assert male subjectivity through cultural authority over the interpretation of female bodily aesthetics and sexuality.