Whorish Representation

Abstract

Using materials from police reports to song chapbooks, this article traces the experience of and discourse about sexually explicit media in late Qing and early Republican Beijing. Although explicit representations of sex and efforts to control them had a long history in China, two new forces converged in this period: ideas about reproductive bodies and technologies of reproducing information. These factors injected unprecedented volatility into the parameters of legitimate sexual representation, allowing them to be truly and widely contested for the first time. Existing Euro-American scholarship takes both the “invention of pornography” and the rise of modernity as peculiarly Western phenomena. Fin-de-siècle Beijing presents a corrective case: the fusion of mass-circulated media and sexuality not only casts a telling light on China in the twentieth century but has also embedded Chinese experiences ever more tightly in a complex ongoing saga of global modernities.