Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai

Rating:
Summary: Shanghai's social history in a sexual snapshot
Review: Dangerous Pleasures is hands-down one of the best Shanghai history books available. It is also one of the most pleasurably readable "academic" books I've encountered. It takes the obviously sensational topic of prostitution in the "Wh*re of the Orient" and treats it with candor and humor, not stooping to either exploiting the sensationalism or stifling it under a heavy woolen blanket of academic deconstruction.

Hershatter - who enjoys a well-deserved reputation as one of the foremost social historians of Chinese women and of Shanghai - depicts and dissects the prostitutes and the moralists alike, and without condescending moralism. She explains and then adopts the more relaxed Eastern attitude towards the sex trade, which is important in understanding the deeper culture of the courtesan in late Qing and Republican China.

The western world is already familiar with Japan's Geisha culture, but China's equally rich courtesan tradion - perhaps because it early attacks by missionaries and abolition by the Communists, those stodgiest of prudes - has less to capture the world's imagination.

Shanghai's historical prostitution ran the gamut, from the rarified courtesans to the White Russians to taxi dancers to the cheap bang for the buck street-walking "Ye Ji" ("wild chicken"!), and Hershatter touches on them all in this exhaustive project, but her primary interest lies with the courtesans.

A young girl would be "apprenticed" (essentially sold, as with all apprenticeships of the era) to a brothel, where she would grow up learning the arts of hospitality while developing talents in singing, musical instruments, dance, poetry, and painting - the pretensions of China's traditional scholar class. Once prepubescent, she would break into society, and compete for admirers personal and public with her culture as much as her appearance. Her repute would determine the price of her virginity, but afterwards she was relatively free to select her patron-lovers, provided she was in enough demand to have a choice.

Hershatter documents how courtesans were the pop stars of early cosmopolitan Shanghai before the occurence of film and pop music, their lives and style dissected in the popular press, which is why the movie and music stars that came later were painted with an aura of disrespectability.

Dangerous Pleasures also follows the backlashes against commercial sexuality, culminating in the total eradication of Shanghai's sex trade in the 1950s under the Communists. The tale continues to (almost) present day, with the emergence of prostitution in the early 1990s at foreign-targetted hotels and discos like Galaxy.

In Shanghai now as in then, there is much prostitution but no precise prostitutes; instead of courtesans and taxi dancers and tour guides and Wild Chickens, we now have Golden Birds and Fishing Girls and Little Country Sisters and Barbershop Misses. Along with "Beyond the Neon Lights", a history of Shanghai's lane culture, "Dangerous Pleasures" illustrates how little has really changed in Shanghai over the past 100 years, which is what makes the city delightful.

Despite its heft and specificity, I highly recommend Dangerous Pleasures as first reading for Shanghai novices as well as for Old Hands. It is far more engaging and interesting and readable than the general histories on the market. Don't let its academic credentials phase you, I took this as train reading and couldn't put down.

Rating:
Summary: A review
Review: Gail Hershatter in Dangerous Pleasures presents a picture of a multi-layered discursive terrain in her case in studying Shanghai prostitution. She focuses on the rapid industrialization transformation of the city at the turn of the century. From the beginning, she acknowledges the limitation and the impossibility in retrieving the voices of prostitutes and confronts the subjectivity of the sources: ¡§All historical records are products of a nexus of relationships that can be only dimly apprehended or guessed at across the enforced distance of time, by historians with their own localized preoccupations.¡¨ (4) Prostitution should be understood through the shifting and multiple meanings of categories and the discourses of different issues: The category views through which prostitution was understood were not fixed, and tracing them requires attention to questions of urban history, colonial and anti-colonial state making, and the intersection of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, with an emerging nationalist discourse. (4)

Poststructuralist theory seems to be a potential solution to the problem since it makes the historian more attentive to the process of contextualization of sources in producing the historical narrative and ¡§the trace of craft, as well as the crafty presentation or concealment.¡¨ (13) Using this method, Hershatter eschews the structuralist approach and creates room for broader themes and interpretations. Her approach can be analyzed through several themes that connect her narrative: the writings by male authors that constitute and symbolize masculinity discourse, the classification and naming that form the dominant ideology, and the representations of prostitutes as a human agents. Hershatter questions the male discourses on courtesans, and the process by which prostitution was used for nostalgic purposes to construct their class identity of the men. Her interpretations are mostly based on the writings which represent the imaginations and nostalgia of male authors. She argues that her sources are not only reflective of thinking of reality at the period, but are active in forming the discourse of urban masculinity. As historian Timothy Gilfoyle describes, her main sources, guidebooks of prostitutes and brothels, ¡§provided rules of etiquette for reasons of self-representation, offered cautionary tales on sexually transmitted disease, presented sentimental views of the past, and served as vehicles for men to remember, classify, and count prostitutes.¡¨ She attempts to deconstruct and demystify the nostalgic memory by analyzing the language of the male writers. She concludes that it symbolizes a form of power and status identification, which can be used to negotiate and communicate with each other. The language and text are gendered and form the notion of elite class culture. In the elite writings, only courtesans exist. Juxtaposed with those narratives are fictionalized accounts of the scams and sufferings of prostitutes and newspaper reporting on the ¡§pheasants.¡¨ They are ways in which ¡§elites constructed and sought to contain categories of subordinated ¡¥others¡¦.¡¨ These classifying strategies of orders have constituted a hierarchy of prostitutes and reinforced stereotypes and shaped public judgments on them. ¡§The narrativized traces that form the historical record courtesans and lower-class prostitutes are also a set of congealed relations of power¡¨ in which courtesans were never depicted of furtive or seamy. (11) Different from the earlier historians, Hershatter analyzes the construction of hierarchies of prostitution and the meanings of categories themselves rather than the inequality with the social history framework. Thus, instead of just observing the causes and the effects of regulations on prostitution, Hershatter looks for the meanings of concepts and studies the political and cultural process in which those meanings are created and how they affect prostitutes. In 1920s, the discourse has shifted from one of nostalgia to one of reform. There were reform campaigns to abolish or regulate prostitution. There was a conscious effort by a new middle-class to eliminate prostitution and create a negative image for prostitutes. In analyzing the process of creating the new conception of prostitution, Hershatter dissects and displays the problematic power relations and conscience underlying it, and how the middle-class tried to move away from the earlier elites through their new writings about venereal disease and public disorder. Prostitution once again became a metaphor but for different purposes. It sheds light on the elites and middle classes discussed their problems, fears, agendas and visions and represents social degeneration. Sex is used as a medium through which people talked about larger paradigms, such as political and cultural transformations, nationality etc. Despite the cacophonous sound made by competing discourses and the difficulty to find the elusive subaltern voice of prostitutes, Hershatter still believe that a single seamless account is possible and their voices can be heard. She contends that the dissonances between the discourses are ¡§arguably where the most interesting mapping can be done.¡¨ The way to reconstruct the past is to recognize that the some of the competing discourses can be seen only in relation to each other. (27) Related to it is the search of agency and resistance. Hershatter gives instances of resistance and agency within the system and the structure: A courtesan who left the brothel with an attractive but impoverished young man, or a courtesan who chose handsome actors and drivers as her companions rather than the free-spending merchants preferred by the madam¡KA street walker who represented herself in court as the victim of traffickers resisted being classified as a bad woman, a threat to social order, or a spreader of disease.(27)

For Hershatter, the search for prostitutes¡¦ voices is possible, even through reading the narratives of elites and males, but only if we read the texts carefully and analyze the contents as well as the language. The sources Hershatter uses are guidebooks, tabloid press, municipal regulations, police interrogations, medical reports, newspaper reports of court cases, and learned articles by elites (reformers, regulators and revolutionaries). She also uses many secondary sources both in Chinese and English.