Fran Martin. Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Résumé En

For anyone paying attention to the cultural production of Taiwan and Hong Kong in the last twenty years, the importance of the theme of lesbian love is obvious; however, most of the stories end on the impossibility of such a love story, concluding either with the marriage or with the death of one of the protagonists, and such heterosexual conclusions might be perceived as quite disempowering. Building on the tremendous success of the operatic film The Love Eterne (Li Han-hsiang, 1962), a love story between two transvestite women in a male school, ending with the reunion of the lovers after death in the form of two butterflies, Fran Martin undertakes a survey of what she calls " the female homoerotic imaginary " in mainstream Chinese media and literary cultures. She questions " the most common narrative, generic and ideological patterns in representations of love between women " (p. 6) and finds that most of the stories are marked by a memorial structure: a grown-up married narrator or protagonist remembers a past love story. She argues that " the markedly mournful cast of these stories' remembrance of same-sex love as a kind of paradise lost implies a critique of the social imposition of hetero-marital relations upon young women as a condition of feminine adulthood " (p.7).