| dc.description.abstract | This thesis discusses the ways in which smoking women as a cultural code was represented and sculptured, and how the cultural image of which was given to the rhetorical strategy shift that occurred during the construction of the gender order in China since modern times. Using poetry and other historical sources in Ming-Qing Dynasty, modern newspapers and magazines, Chinese films in the 1930s as textual materials, this thesis focuses on how the specific historical knowledge, common sense system, cultural logic and the structure of feelings behind the representation had been changed.
First of all, this dissertation sorts out the description of smoking women in Ming- Qing dynasty and the poetry-writing of talented women who smoked. During this period, women smoking was represented as a boudoir anecdote and also a spiritual lifestyle of female poets who prided themselves on being a fairy through tobacco smoking. Secondly, this thesis analyzes the genderization in tobacco culture during China′s modernization process after the First Opium War. From then on, smoking women are stigmatized and morally accused because of their gender identity as female smokers. Anti-smoking discourses in newspaper discussed how women’s smoking had a semantic transmission towards filthy, vulgar, dangerous and evil on the level of both texts and images. I especially focus on an internalized Western perspective in this period of discourse, and how the Chinese intellectuals’ desire to be among the advanced civilizations under the impact of the modernization of western culture reflected in the modern transition period led to the criticism and purge of smoking women who were labeled with negative image. Finally, this thesis selects Chinese films in the 1930s and analyzes “The Goddess”, “The New Women” and “Children of Troubled Times” which were three representative left-wing films during the Left-wing Film Movement. In this chapter, it is clear to find that the semantic logic of dirty, shame, and backwardness had been continued, and at the same time, the imagination of women smoking had been represented as a particular bourgeois habit in order to separate them from the simple and frugal lifestyle of working women. Women smoking had become the characteristic of modernity temptation and ideological backwardness carried by bourgeois women, in the dual sense of spirit and culture.
Through China’s modernization process of denying traditions and taking women as the coordinates to Western civilization, smoking women had not been given a more free and broader space for discussion than in the pre-modern society. Just like smoking in Chinese movies, the smoking women as a dual object of desire and fear always fade out at the end of the story after being abandoned, punished, and exiled by the male protagonist who would be awakened by nationalism and revolutionary consciousness. Negative images were gradually constructed in the progressive discourse packaged with advanced civilization. As the portraits of young and talented women smoking as leisure gradually declined, they were replaced by erotic, depraved, and dangerous images that began to become part of the common sense system of the modern society. | en_US |