This dissertation employs an interdisciplinary approach to address the various configurations of the theatrical tradition of cross-dressing in classical Chinese drama as well as in today's regional operas, placing them in a larger cultural and theoretical context of gender studies. Drawing on cultural theory and viewing the various dramatic and performance texts as signs of historical processes, this study investigates gender construction and gender politics in Chinese theatre in terms of the highly mediated representations of women, gender, eroticism, and cross-dressing presented in a variety of discourses from the Yuan period to the present time. Focusing on cross-dressing as a destabilizing force, it addresses issues of the male/female transvestite theatre and modes of erotic desire, the participation of female players in the cultural (re)production and subversion of gender differences in various historical moments, the figure of the woman warrior and the complexities of gender politics in representing female resistance and containment in relation to the contemporary sociopolitical context, the instability of gender representation in textual and visual media, and the generation of the unsettling notion of gender as performance in traditional Chinese theatrical discourse. The prevalent cross-dressing practice on stage combined with an obsession with "prettiness" and "artistry" in traditional theatre criticism and aesthetics have engendered the subversive feminine, rendering Chinese theatre an unstable site of ideological contestation embodying a simultaneous perpetuation and dismantling of bipolar gender notions and sociopolitical hierarchies. This dissertation also attempts to show that critical reflections on traditional culture can be made to speak to the concerns of today's ideological resistance to political hegemony and cultural dominants, by way of the unveiling of polyvalent meanings of gendering and gendered differences that are constructed, reproduced, dismantled, and contested in that particular site of Chinese culture, i.e., the theatre.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-9050 |
| Date | 01 January 1995 |
| Creators | Li, Siu Leung |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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