Modern Girls in Early-twentieth-century China

In this talk Professor Sang examines the Chinese modern girl in the 1920s and 1930s, a chameleon-like figure that appeared in a wide variety of representations. In particular, she explores how the modern girl image became inflected when it passed from both modernist and elite leftist discourses into middle-brow fiction. She argues that whereas the bourgeois modern girl was by turns glamorized and abjected, stories of lower-class “failed modern girls” were full of pathos and ambiguous class ideology.