Colonialism undressed: Negotiating nudity and the female body in media, arts, and popular medical science in Republican China (1910s - 1949)

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Female nudity was a visual novelty in Republican China (1910s-1949). With an explosion of mass media and a radical shift towards a Westernised urban culture, naked women were variously used to shock, tempt, or modernise Chinese audiences. Through analysing contrasting portrayals of women across print media, art, and medical literature through the Republican period, my project will investigate how the conceptualisation of "woman" and "femininity" changed, focusing on how these were informed by new medical discourse on the female body and vice versa. In media, magazines like Shidai Manhua 'Modern Sketch' (1934-1937) used erotic and highly stylised nude or semi-nude women on their front covers as a daring demonstration of modern intellectual and cultural freedoms. Yuefenpai 'Calendar Posters' combined American advertising techniques with traditional Chinese form, using sexualised women to sell products. Throughout the Republican Period, yuefenpai became increasingly erotic, with less emphasis on the products and more on the commodified and ownable naked woman. In contrast, photographs of nude and semi-nude women in magazines targeted at young women, such as Ling Long (1931-1937), were tasteful, showing women doing active things like dance or swimming, and used to demonstrate the potential of empowered young women in modern China. In art, studying nude models was seen as a demonstration of one's own modernness as well as being controversial enough to garner interest. Revolutionaries like Liu Haisu explicitly linked painting nude women to embracing European modernity and rejecting Chinese traditions. Through art, the male viewer-owner/female object relationship was quickly adopted and filtered into society. Whilst female Chinese artists like Pan Yuliang subverted this new gender hierarchy through their own nude portraits, they were still used as scapegoats by male colleagues in the face of public criticism of nude art.This project will also look at scientific and medical literature, analysing how modernising culture and changing conceptualisations of women's bodies transmitted knowledge of gynaecological health and women's health more broadly. Imported Western medical knowledge distributed through textbooks and pamphlets challenged medical practice and the culture surrounding gynaecological treatment. Changing medical practice was codified in media, e.g., adverts for tampons and contraception, and adopted in daily life. The adoption of such practices differed in urban and rural communities, and between generations.Whilst the cultural figure of "Modern Woman" has been widely analysed, there has been no investigation into the sudden emergence of naked women in Chinese media, and no discussion of the interactions between scientific and cultural conceptualisations of "womanhood" and "women. This research will provide a comparative analysis of the different uses of female nudity across media, the arts, and literature - including medical literature - to explore how culture shaped the perceptions and lived experience of women in Republican China. This research will consider a broad context of colonialism, the interface of arts and science, and commercialisation of the female body. Ultimately, this project will help to uncover the crucial role that the naked female body played in Chinese media and culture in the early twentieth century, considering how urban leaders, intellectuals, and women conceptualised gender, biology, and social power.