Backward Glances
As Martin explains, memorial schoolgirl love stories are popular throughout contemporary Chinese cultures. The same-sex attracted young woman appears in both openly homophobic and proudly queer-affirmative narratives, as well as in stories whose ideological valence is less immediately clear. Martin demonstrates that the stories, television programs, and films she analyzes are not idiosyncratic depictions of marginal figures, but manifestations of a broader, mainstream cultural preoccupation. Her investigation of representations of same-sex love between women sheds new light on contemporary Chinese understandings of sex, love, gender, marriage, and the cultural ordering of human life.
Fran Martin is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film, and Public Culture and a co-editor of AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities; Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation, and Chinese Cultures; and Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia, also published by Duke University Press.