Ethics of desire: Sexual alterity in twentieth-century Chinese-language fiction.

摘要

A survey of twentieth-century Chinese-language fiction written in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, the present study explores the interaction between ethics and desire. It is attentive to "sexual alterity," which refers to sexual identities and deeds that are alternative to the mainstream sexual social relations. While ethics is commonly presumed to regulate sexual alterity, this study suggests that sexual alterity also contests or even redefines the boundaries of ethics.; After the introductory chapter, Chapter Two studies the female impersonators at the traditional theater depicted in twentieth-century novels. These characters are made associated not only with sexual alterity, which is opposed to the "modern" sexual norm, but also with temporal alterity, or the traumatic past of China, which is opposed to the present.; Chapter Three examines the desire of the intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement (a.k.a. the Chinese Enlightenment). For the newly Westernized intellectuals, their field is usually a pedagogical space, with teaching or tutoring as their mode of production, as if they are Pygmalion-like artisans. The teaching acts are intertwined with the intellectuals' libidinal mechanisms.; Chapter Four focuses on the propagandist communist fiction published in the 1950s during Mao Zedong's reign. While it is often presumed that the representation of desire is hardly locatable in the literature of this period, this chapter attempts to reclaim desire, in the form of sexual alterity, even in the shadow of Mao. This chapter examines "orthodox" and "unorthodox" communist literary works, which subscribes to versions of realism.; Chapter Five turns to the domains alternative to "China" and realism. It analyzes "Taiwan" and "science fiction," and inspects how they are similar with sexual alterity. This chapter proposes that "Taiwan," "science fiction," and "sexual alterity" are the signs contingent upon temporal and socio-political parameters, and that they can point out to a hybrid literature of the future.