The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture Yiyan Wang (bio) Song Geng . The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004. x, 256 pp. Hardcover $39.50, ISBN 962-209-620-4. The study of gender relations and forms of sexuality is an established field in Chinese studies, and van Gulik's pioneering Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: Brill, 1974) was among the earliest inquiries in this regard. However, for decades most of the publications in the field have focused primarily on the gender identity and living conditions of women. It was not until the mid-1990s that an investigation of masculine roles began, with a focus on literary representation. In premodern Chinese literary studies, there are Louise Edwards' Men and Women in Qing China: Gender in the Red Chamber Dream (Leiden: Brill, 1994) and Keith McMahon's Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists: Sexuality and Male-Female Relations in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). In contemporary Chinese literature there are Lu Tonglin's Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Oppositional Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experimental Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) and Zhong Xueping's Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). More recently, Kam Louie and Morris Low's edited volume, Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), offers a number of chapters on the literary representation of masculinity, and Ding Naifei explores sexual practice and sexuality in detail with her monograph Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Kam Louie's Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) also devotes a considerable amount of space to Chinese masculinity as manifested in fictional characters. The historical study on Chinese masculinity is a recent event, most noticeably beginning with the forum "Gender and Manhood in Chinese History" in American Historical Review (vol. 105, no. 5 [2000]) and Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom's edited volume, Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Song Geng's The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture is devoted to the study of effeminate male characters and their cultural connotations in premodern Chinese literature. He claims that his book is a "postcolonial reading of Chinese masculinity" (pp. 8-9), and his emphasis is on the differences in masculinity between China and the West in the time before colonialism and Westernization. Song considers the outstanding features of the premodern Chinese gender discourse to include the absence of male and female polarity, [End Page 554] the absence of mind-body duality, the presence of ungendered figures in Confucian classics, the presence of desexualized military heroes in popular fiction and drama, and the presence of the correlative "yin/yang" and wen/wu dichotomies (pp. 10-11). Noticeably, Song disagrees with Kam Louie on the significance of the notions of wen/wu in Chinese gender configuration. While Kam Louie considers wen/wu as fundamental in shaping Chinese masculinity, Song places strong emphasis on yin/yang, asserting that only when one acknowledges the essential role played by yin/yang in the Chinese perception of gender relations can one explain the effeminacy of men in Chinese literature and culture and understand the reasons why the fragile scholar has been held as an embodiment of the ideal male in Chinese culture (pp. 15-16). Song's study of Chinese masculinity is framed in the gender theories of Western thinkers, in particular those of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. He employs Foucaultian concepts of history, power, and sexuality in his reading of premodern Chinese texts. He positions his investigation in the postcolonial context and pays special attention to the distinctive quality of Chinese masculinity as a cultural practice with very different origins from that of the West. It is important to note that Song's reading of the yin/yang discourse is primarily Foucaultian in the sense that his study is centered on power politics and its subsequent determination of gender role by the positioning of the...