Performing Jiang Qing (1914-1991) : gender, performance, and power in Modern China

Historical accounts of Jiang Qing (1914-1991) introduce her as a wife of Mao Zedong, an instigator of the Cultural Revolution, and the ringleader of the so-called "Gang of Four." Yet scholarship on how she thought, what she accomplished, and why she assumed the role of a national villain in Chinese society with such immediacy and durability is scanty. This dissertation approaches the enigma of Jiang Qing by going beyond her marriage to Mao Zedong and her rise to prominence during the Cultural Revolution. It tells a wide-angled story not just about Jiang herself but the entire matrix of cultural imaginaries centered on this most powerful, most visible, and most reviled woman in modern China. This dissertation examines Jiang Qing's life, career, iconography, and afterlife through the lenses of gender, performance, and culture studies. It asks how Jiang has been represented from the 1930s to the present by various parties; what Jiang's absence in scholarship tells us about the world she inhabited and the scholarship that has tried to understand that world; how an excavation and rearrangement of sources about Jiang as an artistic figure reframe understandings of Jiang, the model works, and scholarship on the Cultural Revolution at large. It argues that to understand the Cultural Revolution and the sentiments that followed it one must understand Jiang Qing as an artistic figure and woman. This dissertation contributes to a variety of disciplines. It contributes to existing scholarship on vernacular modernisms by demonstrating how viewers' ready acceptance of the post-Mao narrative of Jiang had much to do with their familiarity with cinematic and print media forms. Images of Jiang as a revolutionary woman, a mother, and dangerous woman in 1930s Shanghai were cited and reenacted as cinematic snapshots representative of gender discourses throughout her public career. They formed the basis of the dominant post-Mao narrative of Jiang that represents her as an ambitious performer who seduced her way to power. This project also contributes to restoring modern spoken drama to a central position during the Cultural Revolution. It creates a genealogy of Jiang Qing's training by renowned theater practitioners interested in making modern concepts legible to audiences who enjoyed traditional forms and in theater production as a collaborative process with political aims. Additionally, this dissertation engages gender debates and Chinese feminist arguments about the Cultural Revolution period by showing how Jiang's experiences as a single working actress and married woman at home gave her a comprehensive understanding of gender issues of the day. The model works represent Jiang's attempt to create a new event of woman in which the domestic realm (where the concerns of May Fourth and socialist state feminists were sited) was depoliticized. Lastly, this project shows how Jiang's use of totalitarian power to engage the biggest question of the century—how to make China modern and rejuvenate national essence—engendered different structures of feeling among intellectuals and artists who interacted with Jiang. An understanding of Jiang's interactions with dramatists and feminists reveals their frustrations with having their ideas appropriated without attribution and their projects stalled and set back after the Cultural Revolution. This interdisciplinary study of Jiang Qing as a subject and object, as a visual itinerary, a gender discourse, an extended performance, and a cultural formation, is also a method that can be used to bridge literary and culture studies with the personal

Keywords: East Asian Languages and Cultures.
Advisor: Lee Haiyan
Wang Ban
Ma Jean
Mittler Barbara