Document Type
Review Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The topic of lesbianism in Chinese cinema or rather the question whether there exists a Chinese lesbian cinema is a daunting task for anyone working in the field of Chinese Studies, East Asian Studies or Comparative Literature. In the age of globalization in which it is almost impossible to live comfortably in the bubble of a monolithic cultural context or tradition, even seemingly simple and straightforward cultural constructs cannot to be taken for granted, let alone something as controversial and obscure as lesbianism whose expressions are poorly documented at best in history. The difficulty here is one we would appreciate when we realize how diverse and uneven cultural developments have been in the world over, and when those of us dealing with world literature like critic Andrew Plaks realizes, "… the fact that, despite our easy acceptance of the commonsense premise that narrative is that branch of literature which relates a sequence of human events, it is precisely in the area of defining the 'event' as an existential unit that we find a wide divergence of conceptual models from culture to culture." This thoughtful remark by Plaks on Chinese narrative tradition comes to the foreground when we attempt to talk about lesbianism in Chinese cinema in the vortex of different cultural temporalities and discursive trajectories. What is most challenging to scholarship on Chinese lesbianism, lesbian identity, and lesbian cinema is to isolate and chronicle a cultural/socialoccurrence with what the continental philosopher HansGeorg Gadamer calls in his Truth and Method an "effective historical consciousness," identifying the moments in which it emerges and becomes possible discursively and historically, as well as those literary and historical events in which lesbianism is something very different from what it is as historicized in the progressive and totalizing narrative of Western civilization. And this is precisely how Liang Shi approaches the topic in his book, Chinese Lesbian Cinema: Mirror Rubbing, Lala and Les.
Repository Citation
Wang, Rujie. "Review of Chinese Lesbian Cinema: Mirror Rubbing, Lala and Les, by Liang Shi." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 16, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1–4. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol16/iss2/38