|
|||
|
Home |
About | Program
| Registration |
Speakers | Receptions
| Call for Papers
| Sponsors | Contacts| CCCS Home
|
|
Antonia is a senior lecturer in history with a research specialty in Chinese history. She is the author of "Far from Where? Jewish Journeys from Shanghai to Australia", (Melbourne University Press, 1999); "Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550 - 1850" (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2003) and co-editor with Anne McLaren of "Dress, Sex and Text in Chinese Culture" (Monash Asia Institute, 1999). She has published a number of articles on issues in Chinese vestimentary history, and is at present writing a book on the cultural politics of Chinese dress in the twentieth century.
The cultural significance of clothing, its unnatural origins and constructed meanings, is nowhere more obvious than in ceremonial dress - the clothes worn on state occasions, for instance, or for rites of passage ceremonies. That Europeans should customarily have worn black for funerals while Chinese wore white is explicable only by reference to different cultural histories, west and east. The same is true for weddings. For Chinese brides to don white dress and veil meant that white fabric had to acquire meanings quite different from those signified by mourning clothes.
This paper explores wedding fashions in twentieth-century China in the context of a vestimentary revolution that by the end of the century had succeeded in transforming the clothing culture of 1900 beyond all recognition. Issues of love, marriage, sexuality, and gender relations in general were deeply implicated in this revolution, although the problem of national culture was also hauntingly present. Given the nexus between nation, family, fertility and the woman in most nationalist iconographies, it might have been anticipated that at weddings, "traditional dress" (however conceived) would have reigned supreme. As it proves, wedding fashions in the twentieth century have a rather complex history, one that suggests at least a rethinking of that nexus in China.
 |
