ABSTRACTS - oia - Portland State University

Xiaoduo Zhang
Feminist Study of the Poetry of Li Shangyin
ASPAC Conference 2010
June 18 – 20, 2010 | Portland, OR
It has been a convention in Chinese poetry to write about women. This convention can be traced back to the
Classic of Poetry (shijing), the earliest existing anthology of Chinese poems back in 1000 Be By conjecturing
the psychological world of female, male poets inevitably adopt the so-called feminine language". Sometimes,
in order to write like a woman, they even impersonate the female persona and voice. This is the case in the
poetry of Li Shangyin, a renowned late Tang poet famous for the allusive and imagist nature of his cryptic
poems. A large portion of his collection is about women, ranging from deities, legendary female figures, to
ordinary female characters.
Feminist theory will be employed as the theoretical frame of the study in order to demonstrate that
(1) The poetic language employed by Li is feminine; (2) The representation of the images of women in Li's
poetry reveal man's conception of what an idealized female should be like in the 7th Century China; (3) The
adoption of female voice and impersonation of female persona not only reinforce the hierarchy of capable
male power and female dependency, but also provide male poets an outlet to reveal their repressed self It is
expected to find the significance of the feminine characteristics in Li Shangyin's poem in influencing later
development of poetry and the emergence of a novel poetic genre -song lyrics.
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Xiaohua Zhang
Dissidence or Distance—Bei Dao’s Poems after 1989
The dissident label has been following Bei Dao ever since he became famous internationally in the mid-1980s.
It has been a most important factor in the reception of his work in the West. My paper aims to challenge the
Western obsession with Bei Dao’s dissident status. It argues that continuing to label Bei Dao as dissident
writer runs the risk of pigeonholing a writer whose work has increasingly shown thematic diversity,
conceptual complexity and stylistic maturity. It could mislead some into trying to find political messages in
his poems, an effort doomed to fail. It could also furnish others with an excuse to dismiss his poems as
political kitsch without even looking at them. Indeed, a closer look at Bei Dao’s poems after 1989 shows that
the poet distances himself increasingly from the public and the political. Through close readings of some of
his poems, my paper demonstrates that Bei Dao’s poetry after 1989 goes through three phases. A gradual
move away from the past and an increasing focus on the private, the personal and the poetic potential of the
language are discernible in his poems. Especially in the third phase, after the poet’s resigned acceptance of
exile, he expands his poetic horizon to cover a whole range of topics, including exile, poetry, travel, life in a
foreign country, landscapes and the night, to name but a few. Therefore, the dissident label is no longer
adequate for his work after 1989.
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Yu Zhang
Cross-dressed Courtesans in Late Qing Shanghai7
In this paper I examine the new, striking and out of order images of cross-dressed courtesans in late Qing
Shanghai. They are mainly presented in three media: lithographs such as Diashizhai huabao(点石斋画报
Dianshizhai Pictorial Magazine); narrative fictions including haishang fanhua meng(海上繁华梦Dream of the
flourishing Shanghai) and Jiu wei hu(九尾狐The nine-tailed fox); and photographs that courtesans took to
record their beauty as well as for commercial advertising. Although in late Qing Shanghai, female crossdressing
was no longer a taboo, in male representation and narration, their cross-dressed images were either
constructed as an exotic variation on traditional objects of male desire, or were attacked as a cause of social
disorder. However, as a seductive fashion set by Shanghai courtesans, cross-dressing was not only a playful
gesture and a unique sexy fascination, but also an expression of their agency. The phenomenon of crossdressing
courtesans was not a simply passive reflection of social change. Rather, these women were projecting
their own interests and concerns thorough their identity performance. In this sense, the cross-dressed female
body was connected to the emerging Shanghai modern at the turn of the twentieth century.
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