Wu Masculinities, Traditional Men-Dog Relationships and the Defence of the Dog-Meat Festival in Modernizing Yulin China

Abstract

Through an 11-month multispecies ethnography in Yulin where the annual Yulin Lychee and Dog Meat Festival is held, this paper examines various types of men-dog relationships in Yulin and explores how such relationships contribute to men’s understanding and performance of their gender and why local men defend the dog meat festival vehemently. It finds that traditional rural men in Yulin keep local dogs for guarding, hunting, and dogfighting while “useless” dogs are eaten. In all these relationships, dogs are understood as humanlike individuals endowed with and serving men’s “ wu masculinities”, a concept that Kam Louie adopts to denote a type of traditional Chinese masculinities that is often associated with working-class men. With a change of lifestyle in the modernization of Yulin, the dog meat festival became the most important platform for the celebration of wu masculinities and is strongly defended by local men for their dignity.