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One can hardly bypass the greatest Chinese female impersonator, Mei Lanfang (1894-1961), when discussing femininity, masculinity, and androgyny in modern China.1 With the guidance and help of the Peking Opera theorist Qi Rushan, Mei revamped Peking Opera into a visual spectacle and perfected the art of female impersonation on the Chinese stage. Most importantly, Mei's androgynous charm not only enchanted a generation of Chinese men and women, but also spread widely outside China: the founders of United Artists-Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin-welcomed him to the United States in 1930, where he was a recipient of honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Southern California and Pomona College; his 1935 Soviet performance was said to have inspired Bertolt Brecht's theory of the "alienation effect"2 and stimulated Sergei Eisenstein to shoot a documentary film on location.3
A black and white photo (Figure 1) vividly displays the kind of attention Mei Lanfang attracted during his tours abroad. Fully made-up in his role as a beautiful young woman, Mei, the middle-aged man, is sitting gracefully between two Soviet women, with three men leaning against the back of the sofa on which Mei is sitting. In this picture, we can identify at least three most intriguing "gazes." Gazing down from his elevated point of view with a mixture of amusement and irony, the bald man standing in the middle seems to be laughing inwardly at Mei, the visual spectacle. Two young girls, one sitting on Mei's left, another at Mei's far right, seem to be exchanging meaningful glances with each other.
The visually stunning "differences" Mei embodies in this photo confirmed the worst fears of the leading Chinese male intellectual, Lu Xun (1881-1936), who worried that China presented an effeminate image to the Western gaze, particularly, the gaze of the proletarian Soviet Union; hence his consistent attacks on Mei's tours abroad in the 1930s.4 For Lu Xun, it was a matter of who had the right to represent China. Mei Lanfang was representing the eternal beautiful feminine as a man and representing China as a female impersonator. This double crime of violating both the sphere of influence of male intellectuals and their responsibility to represent China as masculine and strong formed the basis of the charges against Mei's...