Making girls and boys in twentieth century China

Positing the coexistence of essentialized discourses of instincts and positional, role-based gendering, this talk will explore the construction of gendered childhoods in the Republican and Mao era, using textual, visual and material sources circulated among children and adults between the 1910s and the 1970s. Prescribing how to be, raise or educate “new” subjects, these materials offer a viewpoint on the ideal child persona. 

As crucial contributors to national salvation or, in the Mao era, to socialist construction, model boys and girls were to exemplify the rejuvenated Chinese, antithetical to the allegedly inadequate “traditional” subjectivity. Self-sufficiency, physical vigour, an industrious attitude, techno-scientific competence, commitment to the group and militant patriotism ought to characterize them – according to a template proposed, across political regimes, to boys and girls alike.

Geared towards traits that we now code masculine, the ideal child persona may therefore appear to have been gendered male – an assumption that could be confirmed by the predominance of boys in representations. But were girls really asked to pursue a masculine standard? Such a presumption may be deceptive, as indeed it may be misleading to label traits or a model as masculine, for this coding is historically and culturally contingent. An overly binary reading would, moreover, posit the disappearance in twentieth-century China of earlier gendering, in which role and position could matter more than bodies. Suggesting instead its persistence, and seeking to de-universalize gender, this talk will argue that the ideal child persona (whether boy or girl) is best understood as gendered outer, because of the public, conspicuous positioning that its roles entailed. When performing outside, in the space that traditionally corresponded to the male position - but not necessarily to male identity - girls were acting an outer role. At the same time, within the home, they were to perform inner roles, for which twentieth-century discourse construed them to be innately predisposed.

Speaker

Valentina Boretti (SOAS)

Contact

en2@soas.ac.uk

The History Seminar Series will run Wednesdays in term time 5-7pm.

Image credit: Ying Yeping, Landsberger Collection