The Chinese fetish: Fashioning Asian/American bodies in theatre and film

My dissertation examines constructions of Chineseness that circulate in theatre and film during three pivotal shifts in US-China relations; each era can be characterized by and represented through a different fetish object. I analyze representations of each item in its historical context followed by a corresponding chapter on the continued relevance of the represented object today. Beginning in chapter one with the queue, the hairstyle that served as a nineteenth-century signifier of Chinese masculinity, I excavate the performances of star Charles Parsloe in a number of frontier melodramas. I argue that his yellowface performance works through a kind of ventriloquism, activated by the tonsure as a fetish object. In chapter two, I draw on Lee Edelman's work on fetishism and synechdoche to illuminate the queue in Asian/American Westerns, the only genre that maintains the plait as a visual element. Chapter three addresses Chinese/American femininity and the wearing of qipao in 1930s B-films by actress Anna May Wong. Following Zizek's work on fetishism and ideology, I discuss Wong's qipao as what I call material fantasies in the context of emerging pro-Guomindang sentiments in the US. Chapter four looks at the recent, transcultural resurgence of qipao. I focus on the film In the Mood for Love as an Asian/American text that suggests a productive model of fetishistic spectatorship. When China's government switched to communism in 1949, the specifically gendered fashions of men and women yielded to the unisex Mao suit and its connotations of idealized gender equality. In the US, such dress heralded the rise of a communist threat. Chapter five compares the popular musical Flower Drum Song and what I dub the Chinese communist conspiracy film and the ways in which they alleviated anxieties of a "red scare" through forms of scopic fetishism during the Cold War. I conclude in chapter six by discussing the fetishizing of the Mao suit in recent Asian/American drama.