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

女性裸体在民国时期（1910 -1949）是一种视觉上的新奇事物。随着大众媒体的爆炸式发展和西方化城市文化的根本转变，裸体女性被各种各样地用来震惊、诱惑或现代化中国观众。通过分析在整个共和国时期的印刷媒体，艺术和医学文献中对女性的对比描绘，我的项目将调查“女人”和“女性气质”的概念化是如何改变的，重点是这些是如何通过对女性身体的新医学话语告知的，反之亦然。在媒体方面，像《现代速写》（1934-1937）这样的杂志在封面上使用色情和高度风格化的裸体或半裸女性，作为现代知识和文化自由的大胆展示。月分派的“日历海报”将美国的广告技巧与中国传统的形式结合起来，利用性感的女性来推销产品。整个民国时期，乐粉派变得越来越色情，不再强调产品，而是更多地强调商品化和可拥有的裸体女人。相比之下，《玲珑》（1931-1937）等针对年轻女性的杂志上的裸体和半裸女性照片则很有品味，展示了女性在做舞蹈或游泳等活跃的事情，并被用来展示现代中国年轻女性的潜力。在艺术上，研究裸体模特被视为一个人自身现代性的展示，也有足够的争议性来吸引兴趣。刘海粟等革命者明确地将裸体女性与拥抱欧洲现代性和拒绝中国传统联系起来。通过艺术，男性观众-拥有者/女性客体的关系很快被社会接受和过滤。虽然像潘玉良这样的中国女性艺术家通过自己的裸体肖像颠覆了这种新的性别等级制度，但面对公众对裸体艺术的批评，她们仍然被男性同事当作替罪羊。这个项目还将研究科学和医学文献，分析现代化文化和不断变化的女性身体概念如何更广泛地传播妇科健康和女性健康知识。通过教科书和小册子传播的西方医学知识对医学实践和妇科治疗文化提出了挑战。不断变化的医疗实践被编入媒体，例如，卫生棉条和避孕的广告，并在日常生活中采用。尽管“现代女性”的文化形象已被广泛分析，但对中国媒体中突然出现的裸体女性却没有进行调查，也没有讨论科学和文化对“女性”和“女人”概念的相互作用。本研究将对媒介、艺术和文学（包括医学文学）中女性裸体的不同用途进行比较分析，以探讨文化如何塑造民国时期女性的感知和生活经验。这项研究将考虑殖民主义，艺术和科学的界面，以及女性身体的商业化的广泛背景。最终，这个项目将有助于揭示裸体女性身体在世纪早期中国媒体和文化中扮演的关键角色，考虑城市领导人，知识分子和女性如何概念化性别，生物学和社会权力。

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.