Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Culture

From feminist philosophy to genetic science, scholarship in recent years has succeeded in challenging many entrenched assumptions about the material and biological status of human bodies. Likewise in the study of Chinese cultures, accelerating globalization and the resultant hybridity have called into question previous assumptions about the boundaries of Chinese national and ethnic identity. The problem of identifying a single or definitive referent for the
Chinese body
is thornier than ever. By facilitating fresh dialogue between fields as diverse as the history of science, literary studies, diaspora studies, cultural anthropology, and contemporary Chinese film and cultural studies,
Embodied Modernities
addresses contemporary Chinese embodiments as they are represented textually and as part of everyday life practices. The book is divided into two sections, each with a dedicated introduction by the editors. The first examines
Thresholds of Modernity
in chapters on Chinese body cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - a period of intensive cultural, political, and social modernization that led to a series of radical transformations in how bodies were understood and represented. The second section on
Contemporary Embodiments
explores body representations across the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong today.