The Butterfly Dream—Narrating Women, Sex, and Morality in Chinese Theater

Abstract

In China, theatrical representations of the liberated woman in the twentieth century have focused on women's equal rights in political, economic, and social relations as well as their right to romantic relationships. Until recently, however, women have rarely been represented as autonomous and active subjects when it comes to sex and morality, but rather as objects of male desire or passive recipients of sexual pleasure generated by male actions. Sexual autonomy is, as psychoanalysis and Feminist studies have suggested, a crucial aspect in the construction of an autonomous identity for any individual, without which a woman's emancipation is incomplete. The key for women to achieve sexual autonomy in artistic representations is to turn the female protagonist from victimprotagonist to subject-protagonist in narratives of heterosexual encounter. This subversion of male sexual dominance in theatrical arts has been taking place mostly in the hands of women artists, as seen in the case of The Butterfly Dream (Hudie meng) put on stage by an unique all-female theater, Yue opera (Yueju), in Shanghai in 2001.