Review: Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China, by Y. Yvon Wang

Abstract

I struggled to begin reading this book. One part of me was fatigued. A torrent of modernities have blown through cultural studies over the last decades—linguistic, romantic, photographic, cinematic, affective—you name it, all claiming a slice of something modern without struggling over what precisely beyond rhetoric modernism means. Now there is a pornographic modernity?And then I read the book.Whether you are ready to add pornographic modernity to your internal debate over what is at bottom a historiographic dispute, or not, Wang’s argument is both irrefutable and comfortably synthetic. Wang’s premise is the reverse of mine. Under incontrovertible economic, political, social, physical, and generic upheaval, an event without a predicate, modern porn, popped onto the historical horizon. Then just as suddenly, novel sexual materials started piling up and new porn markets emerged. I underline Wang’s causal argument here because it is more evental than chronological precisely in order to interrupt developmental explanations; this acorn did not just not grow into an oak tree, it grew into a cypress. In other words, Wang is presenting archival contingencies in order to show why the usual historical frameworks—e.g., development, nativism, culturalism, mediatization, etc.—do not explain democratization of smut. “Pornography,” Wang stipulates, “is the materialization of stigmatized desire; it is produced as forces expanding access to titillating media collide with forces trying to restrict such access…in China or elsewhere” (p. 17, my emphasis). That said the book engages material, social, demographic themes in the effort to figure out how “reactionary as well as revolutionary” (p. 154) the porno industry and its various subcultures erupted inside a specific historical conjuncture. Various catastrophes interrupted elite hegemony over images, including the porno, and masturbators stepped forward to redefine reader access.Chapter One establishes a perceptual category, “yin hierarchy,” to describe previous elite controls over literacy including sexual images, and its incremental destabilization of that “ideal sociosexual order” late imperial legal and social historians have analyzed. By way of “subversive patterns of lived experience” (p. 54), Wang argues, licentiousness increased. “Part One” argues that the prime forces allowing modern licentiousness were globalization of print and commodification of ideas; so that “ideas like hygiene were transmitted as goods.” This means Wang is not recounting a story, but showing where manifest change expressed itself in the worlds of objects, affects, everyday life and concepts (p. 59). Chapter Two knits secondary sources into a historiographical argument about imperialism and commodity culture. Wang argues that elite control over licentiousness characterized late imperial Chinese political economy; when novel porn commodities appeared they initially spread rapidly through the older networks. However, new readers meant new buyers and public players, and in Chapter Three, “The Implied Masturbator Speaks: Technologies and Markets Catalyze Transformations to Yin Ideology,” an entire section, “Women Enter the Public Eye,” considers women’s actual fleshly and photographic nudity as an overdetermination in commodification. Chapter Four, “Sex(ology) Sells, The Marketplace Assimilates Global Modern Innovations,” tracks how porn, abruptly and scientistically settled into older distribution networks, surged creating larger and more massified markets. In this regard, Wang’s data echoes innovations in market branding for industrially produced cigarettes, soap powder, kerosene, cars, and tram cars. Chapter 5, “Plus c'est la même chose: Reinventing Licentiousness for a New Age” summarizes the general argument: “the photograph and the female nude pointed toward a new pornographic paradigm…licentiousness opened the way for the implied mastubator to speak in his own defense…[and] raised the stakes for self-appointed cultural leaders to defend their positions of power” (p. 169). This summary aligns the May Fourth Movement with reallocation politics in which a new educated, globalized, modernized bourgeoisie struggled to carry out on porn and their own sexuality the cosmopolitan elitism for which they are celebrated.In a final summary, “Conclusion: From Yin to Yellow” Wang powerfully reiterates earlier points and generalizes to the full extent thinkable. Noting pornography’s short existence, Wang’s final thoughts in what is an inventive, synthetic, careful historical monograph address commodification of licentiousness and bodies themselves—their pleasures, dangers, imaginaries, licentiousness, illicitness and general ickiness—and suggests that normative judgement about porn be held in abeyance. Intellectuals like to joke about “herding cats” but writing historically about licentiousness, new masturbatory images, and changing accesses to porno is like trying to soothe a rabid raccoon. It feels good to have the raccoon in the hen house. Meaning, that usually provative books in history of sexuality are less sexy than this one, and I suspect that cross-over readers outside China studies will find a lot of resonance with histories of their own.