中華民國期のビジュアリティとセクシュアリティ --刊行物における經驗，方法，寫眞--

Abstract

This paper explores three themes that are central to my monograph, Republican Lens : Gender Visuality and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (University of California Press, 2015) : experience, method, and the interrelationship between visuality and sexuality in the early Chinese women's periodical press. The prime source for the paper is China's first commercial women's journal, Funü shibao 婦女時報 (Women's Eastern Times, Shanghai), which was founded in the last year of the Qing dynasty and remained in print throughout the first six years of the Republic (1911-1917). Funü shibao was published in the period when experience was increasingly valorized as an epistemological category and women were increasingly called upon to share their experience as knowing national subjects. The paper examines how these shifts unsettled the previous gendered hierarchy of experience, both opening and foreclosing new spaces for women's self-expression. In examining this complex theme of experience, it is necessary to read various textual and visual components of the journal against each other : to see how women's experience is represented or critiqued in essays, cover art, or poetry, for example. This brings us to the second part of the essay on method. The paper introduces a methodology that can be applied to the periodical press more broadly. It is based on three different modes of reading --‘horizontal, ' ‘integrated, ' and ‘situated'-- which are all explicated in the paper. The paper then uses this methodology to read what is one of the most profound textual silences in the early twentieth century women's periodical press : the silence surrounding the experience and meanings of female sexuality. This silence is particularly deafening because this period witnessed the most significant shift in China's sex-gender system in centuries : the emergence of respectable women into public space and public consciousness.