Performing Masculinity and the Self: Love, Body, and Privacy in Hu Shi

Abstract

H U SHI (1891-1962) IS AT ONCE THE QUINTESSENTIAL public man and private person of modern China. He was the nation's most influential intellectual leader, scholar, and educator from 1917, when he returned to China after having completed his PhD work at Columbia University, until 1948, when he left for the United States on the eve of the Communist takeover of Beijing. His multifaceted roles during these years included a stint as China's ambassador to the United States (1938-42). While fame and stature turned him into an object of constant public gaze, he himself fed curiosity for such scrutiny: he was a most prolific producer of autobiographical records that he selected for publication, circulated among close friends, and duplicated for safekeeping in multiple locations. At the same time, he was a private person who vigilantly guarded the innermost secrets of his private life. The voluminous diaries, memoirs, and correspondence-a veritable autobiographical archive-that he assembled and preserved were a testimony to a lifelong effort on his part to set the parameters for how his private life was to be gazed at, constructed, and appreciated. It is as though he had inscribed his own life to provide a master narrative for his future biographers, thereby purging from the source anything that was not already scripted by him, and to foreclose unwanted prying-voyeuristic and otherwise-into his private life. While Hu Shi's autobiographical archive will remain a prodigious source of information about his life and times, this article treats it as a repository of cultural artifacts as well as a mine of information. Inspired by Judith Butler's notion of performativity and drawing on the insights from feminist auto/biographical and masculinity studies, this article situates Hu Shi in the discursive processes through