My dissertation investigates twentieth century Peking opera actresses in mainland China and Taiwan. By focusing on their eroticized gender performances, I trace China’s sociocultural and political transformation from an early modern empire to a modern nation-state in the twentieth century. Concerned with the patriarchal legacy of Peking opera, I address gaps in the current opera history literature, which mainly focuses on male actors’ sexuality implicated in their cross-dressing practices. By utilizing eroticism as a theoretical lens, I examine the power of erotica in shaping the society’s perception of actresses. I theorize about these subjects’ affective experiences—their desire, sensation, sentimentalism, oppression, depression, and self-perception—in order to illuminate variations of gender performances within Chinese society, which, in turn, were in great flux. Drawing together affective encounters between performers and audiences, I complicate the epistemological morphology of eroticism in Peking opera by illustrating the unstable aspects of gendered subjectivity that were frequently assumed to be binary in Confucian ethics. This project thus conceptualizes discourses and practices surrounding ideas of biological sexes and gendered constructs in modern China. Moreover, it identifies links between gendered symbols and visions of the nation by analyzing the ways erotic culture prompted intellectuals’ anxiety over moral decay within the nation at large: they argued that racy opera entertainment regressed the nation’s move toward modernity in the twentieth century.

This interdisciplinary project centers on opera history, gender performance, and erotic culture, bringing together the fields of theater and gender studies, while also advancing the landscape of Chinese and Sinophone studies (through its attention to Taiwan). My research, in particular, scrutinizes the different approaches to cross-dressing actresses (kunsheng) in mainland China in the Republican era and that in postwar Taiwan to analyze how political and cultural dynamics resulted in the fading of cross-dressing (in China) and the continuation of kunsheng (in Taiwan). Drawing from the perspective of Sinophone studies, I regard Taiwanese Peking opera as a place-based Sinitic-language performing genre and analyze how its kunsheng training presents local and global consciousness in Taiwan. This comparative analysis thus fills the lacunae in Peking opera male impersonation, further demonstrating how the practices of cultural and gender performances on Taiwan, despite its geopolitical marginalization, challenge the historiography of a hegemonic China and a marginalized Taiwan.