Divining Same-sex Schoolgirl Love from Women Writings

Talks in Chinese Humanities

Do women love beyond marriage? Are they capable of loving each other? If Sedgwick has proposed a homosocial world amid the privileged men in Between Men (1985), what can be said about the privileged women–those who received the first wave of modern education in Republican China and the colonial Taiwan as well as those who became expatriate students in the US during the scourge of Cultural Revolution. In this talk, I locate four texts from the last century: “Lishi’s Diary” (1923) by Lu Yin and “There is such a thing” (1928) by Ling Shuhua in the May-Fourth literary period, “Flower Blooming Season” (1942) by Yang Qianhe in the colonial Taiwan, and "Our old classmates are doing well” by Eileen Chang in the US during the rise of Hippie culture and anti-Vietnam-War movement. What threads through these historically disparate and geographically diverse texts are the narratives of female friendship in seemingly all-girl schools. Youthful, uninitiated and bound by the campus life, these schoolgirls seem to only have one another and seem to be exclusively drawn to one another. The verb “divine” in the title of the paper suggests a strong sense of ineffability to these girls’ mutual sentiments. This talk will provide a contour for such sentiments, further arguing that they should be treated as precursors to queer texts that emerged after the 1990s that began to bear clear marks of tongzhi identities.

About the speaker

Dr Sophia Huei-Ling Chen, postdoctoral researcher at Academia Sinica (Taipei). Her research focuses on tongzhi and queer literary narratives from the Sinosphere.

"Talks in Chinese Humanities" is co-presented by the China Studies Centre, the Discipline of Chinese Studies and the Australian Society for Asian Humanities at the University of Sydney and the UNSW Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture's Judith Neilson Chair of Contemporary Art.

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