International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

Suggesting that erotic relations between women in China may not be so culturally marginal as has generally been assumed, BACKWARD GLANCES contends that in the contemporary mass culture of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan the topic of love between women is linked to a mode of representation based in memory. From an analysis of post-1970s mainstream popular culture—pulp fiction, TV soap opera, women's autobiography, translated Japanese manga and anime, and teenpics, usually centered on schoolgirl romances—Fran Martin shows that female homoeroticism is culturally imaginable only in youth, is absolutely foreclosed and forbidden for an adult future, and hence is available for representation only through the backward-looking experience of memory. This memorial mode casts the endings of these same-sex narratives as ambivalent, and often openly tragic, and suggests that same-sex love can serve as an ennobling experience for young women.

Martin traces the early-20th-century origins of the Chinese schoolgirl romance narrative and frames the emergence of these narratives in the context of both the transculturation of European sexology in China in the early 20th century (Havelock Ellis et al.), an  the generic conventions of popular cross-sex romance which some writers appropriate to present a markedly utopian vision of young women's same-sex love. She then charts the late-20th-century resurgence of these narratives, demonstrating how they consciously rehearse the codes of modern Chinese-language tragic romance fiction. These stories critically interrupt, rather than merely reproduce, the naturalizing forces of the heteronormative, sexological account of adolescent sexual development. Moving next to the form in which the schoolgirl romance reappears in the People's Republic in the immediate post-Mao era, Martin sees emerging a melancholia of adult femininity in which the loss of female same-sex attachment cannot be mourned. She then examines the minoritizing discourse on lesbian masculinity, illustrating via a genealogy of tomboy narrative since the 1970s how tomboy characters have tended either to fade quietly from narrative focus as the story progresses, or to disappear by more dramatic means (often untimely death). Moving to television-movie adaptations of schoolgirl romance, Martin demonstrates that widely circulated forms of representation have a material impact on how their consumers understand themselves and their place in social life. Many of these programs, Martin shows, are engaged in the cultural labor of publicly mourning the end of lesbian futures. Finally, in cinema since the late 1990, she recognizes an effort to resist the memorializing trend in mainstream representation of female homoeroticism and instead to present more overtly anti-homophobic treatments of love between women.