Sounding the Everyday

Abstract

“Sounding the Everyday: Gendered Acoustic Aesthetics of Immaterial Labor and Female Leadership in Socialist Shanghai,” aims to challenge the popular view that a highly abstracted and politicized socialist labor aesthetics exiles the category of everydayness. Using the 1959 film Colors of Spring (Wanzi qianhong zong shi chun) as an example, Xiao shows that the radical agenda of socialist revolution turns traditional “feminine noises” (including women’s everyday conversations and particular sonic elements related to their everyday labor) into revolutionary sounds. More importantly, women play an unprecedentedly active role in shaping the parameters of the new sociopolitical agenda not only through joining the labor force to produce material goods, but also through expanding their access to sound-producing practices that should also be recognized as essential forms of gendered labor (including reproductive and care work at home as well as emotional, intellectual, and organizational labor at work). Through a revisit to the aesthetics and politics of representing tangible sensory experiences of women’s immaterial labor in socialist cinema, we could better understand the sociopolitical significance of socialist women’s liberation that should not be reduced to a utilitarian top-down project of liberating the untapped potential of women’s labor power, but more of a biopolitical revolution through which women transform themselves into active agents in creating new sound practices, communicational networks, social relations, and subjectivities.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the support of the University of Kansas’s Hall Center and the National Humanities Center for my research. My heartfelt thanks also go to Ping Zhu and Zhuoyi Wang, the two editors of the special issue, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions that help strengthen and enrich this article.

Notes

1 Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Cultural Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 1.

2 Nicole Huang, “Listening to Films: Politics of the Auditory in 1970s China,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 7, no. 3 (2013): 190–91.

3 Andrew F. Jones, Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 7.

4 Dayton Lekner, “Echolocating the Social: Silence, Voice, and Affect in China’s Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist Campaigns, 1956–58,” The Journal of Asian Studies 80, no. 4 (November 2021): 934. Also see Lei Wei, “Beyond Propaganda: The Role of Radio in Modernizing China in the Socialist Era, 1949–76,” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 7, no. 3 (2016): 300.

5 Huang, “Listening to Films,” 191.

6 Cai Xiang, Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966, trans. Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 306.

7 Ann Anagnost, National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 31. Elizabeth J. Perry, “Moving the Masses: Emotion Work in the Chinese Revolution,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 7, no. 2 (June 2002): 111–28.

8 Cai, Revolution and Its Narratives, 331.

9 Ibid., 331–32.

10 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 110.

11 Ibid., 201.

12 Ibid., 66.

13 Ding Yaping 丁亚平, “Shen Fu, a Master Filmmaker of His Generation” (“Yidai dianying dashi Shen Fu” 一代电影大师沈浮), Biographical Literature (Zhuanji wenxue 传记文学) 5 (2018): 126.

14 Jin Bo 金波, “Colors of Spring: A Collective Portrait of Women in a New China” (“Wanzi qianhong zong shi chun: Xin Zhongguo funü xingxiang de jizhong zhanshi” 万紫千红总是春：新中国妇女形象的集中展示) Friend of Senior Comrades (Lao tongzhi zhi you 老同志之友) 3 (2012): 10.

15 According to R. Murray Schafer, “the term soundmark is derived from landmark and refers to a community sound which is unique or possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by the people in that community.” R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994), 10.

16 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), 17.

17 Ding, “Shen Fu, a Master Filmmaker,” 127.

18 For a more comprehensive discussion of the changing idea of gongzuo, see Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in China, edited by Barbara Entwisle and Gail E. Henderson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), particularly Part One “Perspectives on Work.”

19 Quoted in Dong Jiazun 董家遵. Zhongguo gudai hunyinshi yanjiu (中国古代婚姻史研究 A Study of the History of Marriage in Dynastic China) Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 1995. 292.

20 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Turning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1977/1994), 4.

21 Schafer, The Soundscape, 76.

22 Cai, Revolution and Its Narratives, 304.

23 Wang Zheng, “Feminist Struggles in a Changing China,” in Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics, ed. Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2021), 121.

24 Schafer, The Soundscape, 48.

25 Ibid., 48.

26 Cai, Revolution and Its Narratives, 176.

27 A Copper Coin (Luohan qian 罗汉钱) is a 1952 Shanghai opera (Hu ju 沪剧) based on Zhao Shuli’s 1950 story Registration (Dengji 登记) that draws a picture of how the 1950 marriage law changed traditional customs concerning courtship and marriage especially in rural China. The acoustic aesthetics of ambivalence and uncertainty created by the tension between the old form (local opera) and the new content (marriage law and family reformation) also indexes the conflicts between the two friends and their clashing values in the film.

28 Lei, “Beyond Propaganda,” 298.

29 Tani E. Barlow, “Gender and Identity in Ding Ling’s Mother,” Modern Chinese Literature 2, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 124.

30 Andrew Jones cited the phrase from Liang Maochun’s study of “quotation songs” (yulu ge 语录歌) to characterize the acoustic aesthetics of the Cultural Revolution, which could be used to define the general revolutionary soundscape of the Great Leap Forward as well. Jones, Circuit Listening, 72.

31 Ban Wang, “Laughter, Ethnicity, and Socialist Utopia: Five Golden Flowers,” in Maoist Laughter, ed. Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019), 21.

32 Dong Limin 董丽敏, “Revolution, Gender and the Reformation of Everyday Life Ethics: A Study of Ru Zhijuan’s Fiction in 1950s and 1960s” (“Geming, xingbie yu richang shenghuo lunli de biange—dui Ru Zhijuan 1950–1960 niandai xiaoshuo de yizhong kaocha” 革命、性别与日常生活伦理的变革 – 对茹志鹃1950–1960年代小说的一种考察), Collections of Modern Chinese Literature Studies (Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan 中国现代文学研究丛刊) 6 (2018): 49.

33 Cai, Revolution and Its Narratives, 304.

34 Perry, “Moving the Masses,” 112.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hui Faye Xiao

Hui Faye Xiao is a professor of Chinese at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture (2014) and Youth Economy, Crisis, and Reinvention in Twenty-First-Century China: Morning Sun in the Tiny Times (2020), and the coeditor of Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics (2021). She is currently working on a third monograph tentatively titled “The Hen Cackles in the Morning: Gendered Soundscape and Female Leadership in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.”