| This dissertation is a study of male same-sex relationships in China during the first half of the twentieth century. It adopts a queer approach to the historical study of China, in that it resists the naturalized understanding of heterosexual relations as the only way of human. It closely examines gendered and sexual significations of the language, pointing out the processes by which heterosexual norms was produced and searching for historical moments when a queer utopia was imagined to challenge the conventional gender and sexual order.;The dissertation asks the following questions: what kinds of thinking about male same-Sex relations were circulating in twentieth-century China? What was the long-term historical trajectory of this thinking, how did it interact with Western sexological knowledge, how did it condition the dissemination and acceptance of Western concepts of homosexuality? How were these ideas both Chinese and Western, transformed in the process of their interaction? How did the social and political context in which the process occurred determine the meaning of male same-sex relations, and in turn, what can those meaning tell us about nationalism, modernity, and semi-colonialism in twentieth-century China?;The dissertation argues that male same-sex relations figured in many different ways across genres, and multiple conversations went on at the same time in China during the first half of the twentieth century. From the early 1920s to the early 1930s, while translators of Western sexology were divided between those who pathologized homosexuals for social immorality and those who praised same-sex love as the foundation for a human utopia, a group of iconoclastic literary writers followed the mode of Western decadent writings, presenting a beautiful image of intimacy between male friends and posing male same-sex love as a protest against conventional social and sexual norms. Meanwhile, cultural conservatives used tabloid newspapers as their forum, casting sex between men as a sign of the weakness of the nation. As the Japanese invasion deepened the national crisis from the late 1930s, while these conservative writers continued to blame men who had sex with other men for the misfortunes of the nation, progressive literary writers also made an effort to erase the history of male same-sex relations in the Peking opera field. |
