Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai

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 littl

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 a