What is masculinity in the context of Chinese modernity? How does it become a polemic issue? What does it have to do with May Fourth male feminism? When does the modernist trope of masculinity create a consolidated male identity, despite the historical differences that have inhibited male sameness as we now understand? What role does it play in the making of the transgendered identity of masculine women who occupy the center of Chinese discourses on modernity? How does masculinity become a trope of post-patriarchal heterosexuality by uniting the two different sexes via masculine sameness? In what sense does the reciprocation between heterosexual men and masculine women transform the meanings of heterosexuality, domesticity, and statehood?; In a study of Republican spoken drama between the inception of the May Fourth movement and the end of WWII, I analyze the metaphorical slippage of the term masculinity between a relatively fixed sexual distinction and a more or less fluid gender identity. Central to my readings are modern theatrical practices, which by evoking the ambiguities surrounding masculinity inaugurate a compelling norm of sexuality centering upon men's heterosexual desire for masculine women. Using the so-called “Nora plays” as my primary texts, I closely examine two prominent aspects in the post-May Fourth rewritings of Ibsen's A Doll's House. I locate in the May Fourth male feminism a catalytic rupture of masculinity between the oppressive patriarch and feminist son, and emphasize in the Republican drama of heterosexual elopement the masculine cultivation of the female rebel. In the post-May Fourth Republican China, where heterosexual love becomes an increasingly potent discursive factor to erotically integrate and brutally police the modern nation state and its citizenry, I argue that the intensified eroticism of masculine ambiguities constitutes one of the most original expressions of Chinese modernity.
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