2017/01/29 by Paul Bailey · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Chinese history and philosophy #Philippine History and Culture #Japanese History and Culture
paper · doi:10.1163/15685268-00192p02
openalex publication_date 2017/01/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This article explores the multiple and complex ways in which the gendered foreign ‘Other’ was discursively represented in primarily women’s magazines during the late Qing and early Republic, a period that begins with an unravelling of the confidence in the ‘traditional’ Chinese Woman as the symbol of China’s superior civilisation (and, in a larger context, when Chinese elites were increasingly compelled to interrogate the raison d’être of their own social and cultural values amidst growing Anglo-American global hegemony). The article suggests that the ‘othering’ of the foreign woman in the early twentieth century anticipates contemporary Han Chinese representations of the Western Woman as an ‘ambiguous fetish’ and of ethnic minority women as exotic figures on the lower rungs of a civilisational ladder.