My project investigates Peking opera actresses playing male roles, or kunsheng, in Republican-era mainland China and in postwar Taiwan. I examine these gender performances through the lens of eroticism, which positions me to consider public affective experiences surrounding kunsheng. To date, Peking opera historiography has emphasized the practices of actors cross-dressing to play women or actresses’ gender-straight acting but rarely pays attention to women cross-dressers. I make critical interventions into existing opera history literature by illuminating the uniqueness and the multiplicity of kunsheng from various aspects of opera performance and everyday life. In this project, I demonstrate how kunsheng actresses as transgressive figures appropriated strategic performances that were inspired by male actors to win over audiences and obtain commercial and artistic achievements, while resisting oppression that patriarchal structures imposed. Through this analysis of kunsheng, I ultimately trace China’s sociocultural and political transformation from an early modern empire to a modern nation-state.
I am trained in both Performance Studies and Chinese cultural and gender history. My project thus brings together Chinese opera history, gender history, Sinophone Studies, performance theory, Queer Studies, and Digital Humanities. This study scrutinizes the different approaches to kunsheng in Republican-era mainland China and in postwar Taiwan to analyze the political and cultural dynamics that resulted in the waning of the practice of cross-dressing in mainland China and its continuation in Taiwan. This comparative analysis fills a lacuna in the scholarship on Peking opera, further demonstrating how the practices of cultural and gender performances in Taiwan challenge the historiography of a hegemonic China and a marginalized Taiwan.
This project is organized into four chapters—all of which draw on an array of archival documents from libraries in Taipei, Shanghai, and Beijing to address a historical transformation or theoretical theme surrounding kunsheng’s gender performances. In Chapter One, I investigate the transformation in public perception of kunsheng’s virtues from 1880-1920. Chapter Two centers on well-known kunsheng Meng Xiaodong (1908–1977) and showcases how media sensation simultaneously challenged and strengthened conventional gender discourses in modern China from 1920-1950. In Chapter Three, I delve into Republican women cross-dressers’ homoerotic desires, arguing that the same-sex love of kunsheng parodied elite men’s same-sex love, and in doing so liberated female desire from the long-standing euphemistic trope of sisterhood. In Chapter Four, I analyze the way Taiwanese Peking opera kunsheng performers have taken advantage of mainland China’s male performers’ artistic legacy to “legitimize” and “effeminize” Taiwan’s Peking opera in postwar Taiwan. Together, these chapters illuminate the ways in which kunsheng, opera critics, and audiences perceived, consumed, and negotiated the public culture of erotica, fluid gender identities, and heterogenous gender roles.
