Violence and Desire in Beijing - SAGE Journals - SAGE Publications

Violence and Desire in Beijing A Young Chinese Woman’s Strategies of Resistance in Father–Daughter Incest and Dating Relationships

Violence Against Women Volume 13 Number 12 December 2007 1319-1338 © 2007 Sage Publications 10.1177/1077801207310802 http://vaw.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

Xiying Wang Beijing Normal University

Petula Sik Ying Ho University of Hong Kong

In Mainland China, there is a lack of public awareness of and systematic research on dating violence and incest. This article fills a gap in the research in this area by examining a woman’s lived experience of father–daughter incest and dating violence. The article adopts the standpoint of third-wave feminists and highlights women’s agency and resistance to abuse. Meng Xi, the subject of the case study in this article, is regarded as a “survivor” rather than a “victim,” and her various strategies of resistance—in particular, how she talks about her body and linghun (intelligence soul), and uses the two as sites of resistance—are examined. The article sheds light on the desire and sexuality of women in contemporary China, and especially the struggle between spiritual and material pursuits. Keywords:

body; dating violence; desire; incest; resistance

Introduction This is a case study of how a young Chinese woman (Meng Xi)1 responds to the experience of father–daughter incest and how she makes sense of her dating experience. Meng Xi’s own account of father–daughter incest is not just about the brutality of a man raping his daughter. Her repeated complaints regarding the torture of her linghun highlight the importance of attending to the spiritual violation that is involved in the incestuous abuse. Meng Xi’s narrative of her dating experience, although very complicated, captures many common elements in the dating lives of young Chinese women. Her speaking out, even though only in private, is particularly worthy of our attention, especially in the social context of Mainland China, where sex is still a taboo subject and there are few channels through which women can speak out about their experiences of being abused.

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This article adopts the standpoint of third-wave feminists and puts the emphasis on women’s resistance as “survivors” rather than “victims.” The article highlights Meng Xi’s various strategies of resistance, which include the use of a body-linghun split to trivialize the harm of the experience of incest, the acknowledgment of bodily desire even in father–daughter incest, the expression of bodily power through choices about the skin color of boyfriends and lovers, changing the strategies for gaining power from harming herself to harming others, and the interpretation of sexual practice to justify sexual coercion in dating relationships. This article fills gaps in the literature in several ways. First, there is a lack of public awareness of and systematic research on dating violence and incest in Mainland China. Second, the article regards Meng Xi as a subject of resistance and offers a new picture of women in violent relationships in the changing Chinese society. Third, the article deconstructs one of the most dominant explanations, which asserts that violence against women is often justified and explained through recourse to “Confucian ideas regarding men as dominant and superior, with emphasis on women as virtuous and inferior” (Hester, 2004, p. 1432) and explains how Chinese women are tolerant of abuse because of the internalization of such beliefs (Gil & Anderson, 1999; Tang, Wong, & Cheung, 2002; Wang, 1999; Xu, Campbell, & Zhu, 2001). It shows how young Chinese women are being influenced by discourses on modernity and globalization, which makes it possible for them to situate themselves in a better position to resist. Fourth, the debate between linghun and body has existed in Chinese culture for a long time, and this article, as an empirical study, contributes to the debate by documenting how a Chinese woman understands the relationship between the two and uses these cultural resources to constitute her subjectivity. Finally, although it is a case study of one woman’s struggle of desire and sexuality in the context of father–daughter incest and her current dating relationships, it sheds light on the social transformation of the desire and sexuality of Chinese women as Chinese society moves from the prosocialist to the postsocialist, and, in particular, on the struggle between spiritual (linghun) and material (bodily) pursuits.

Meng Xi’s Story I am born to die, please give me freedom. I am a naked soul,2 yes, just as a naïve child, piercing through the world. And gradually I will forget how to cry. Internet ID of Meng Xi3

In the poem that Meng Xi uses to identify herself in the world of the Internet, in the first sentence, “please give me freedom” shows a profound feeling of insufficiency. What is the subject of this great power that is in opposition to “freedom”? Naked is typically an adjective that is used to describe the human body, but in the

Wang, Ho / Strategies of Resistance in Incest and Relationships

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second sentence, it is used to depict the soul (linghun). Conversely, naïve is an adjective used to describe linghun, but it is used here to represent the immature child’s body. Both “naked soul” and “naïve child” are powerless subjects, but she uses the powerful verb piercing to resist a large objective being, the world. What, then, is the closing scene of this resistance? This poem is open-ended: If we were to turn its imaginative ending into a script, it would be the most dramatic part, but if we were to write it into an autobiography, it would be a tale of pain and pleasure intertwined. In this case study, in which both the body and linghun become sites in which power and resistance are exerted through violence and desire, we explore Meng Xi’s relationships with her father, boyfriends, and lovers. When Meng Xi sat down in the interview, the first sentence that she uttered was “My love has no relation to violence,” because she knew that our research topic was dating violence among Beijing adolescents and young adults. Meng Xi, aged 27, wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, gym shoes, and a lot of costume jewelry, looks sort of like a hippie. She is a native of Beijing, an only child, whose father is a university professor and whose mother is an accountant. After graduating from an art high school, she undertook various jobs, and at the time of interview, she was a keeper of a clothing store. Similar to most of the interviewees in our research project, Meng Xi’s dating story is very complicated: When I was 14 years old, I had nine male playmates. When I was 17, I suffered heartbreaking unrequited love; the man I loved didn’t accept me. My formal first love began when I was 18 and lasted 4 or 5 years. We had deep feelings for each other, and even now I still wear the ring he gave me.

Meng Xi has slept with nearly 30 different men, 4 of whom she identifies as “boyfriends.”4 She has had at least 6 non-Chinese boyfriends or lovers, and at the time of the interview was in a relationship with an African American man whom she defined as a boyfriend. In the narrative, there are many obvious instances of violence in her dating relationships, although she does not acknowledge them as violence. The acts of violence that Meng Xi’s dating partners committed against her included one of her lovers kidnapping and attempting to rape her, repeated coerced sex by dating partners, and a boyfriend who publicly humiliated her. Meng Xi has also used violence against herself, attempting suicide many times to prevent her first boyfriend from leaving her. According to common expectations, as a professor’s daughter from a middleclass family, Meng Xi’s life path should have included attending university, finding a good job, and having a creditable and considerate boyfriend. She became, however, a sexually active woman as a means of resisting the so-called normal female image. “My father was my first man.” In this short sentence, the two different roles of father and sexual partner overlap. She tells us about this other side of her life in an

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indifferent tone. She was raped by her father in a hotel at the age of 12 when they traveled out of town. The father–daughter incest lasted 11 years, until she told her mother about it directly at the age of 23. Her father bought Meng Xi a new flat on the insistence of her mother, and she then moved away from home to live alone. Meng Xi’s nightmare of being sexually assaulted by her father was over. The relationships in the story are complex. They involve not only dating relationships but also Meng Xi’s family relationships and, more generally, the unequal power relationship between a father and his teenaged daughter. The story shows her inner struggles, and it seems as though she equates the violence in her life only with the incest experience but refuses to define it as “abusive.” Using her words, “It does not count as abuse; it is an offense at most.” Moreover, she refuses to define her dating experiences as violent, despite the fact that there have been many obviously violent incidents. This article attempts to answer the questions of how Meng Xi makes sense of her own experience of incest and dating, how she attempts to place herself in an advantageous position in various power relationships, how she exerts resistance in different relationships through the interplay between her body and linghun, and how her personal life sheds light on women’s desire and sexuality in contemporary Chinese society.

Incest, Dating Violence, and Feminism In Mainland China, as mentioned above, there is a lack of public awareness of and systematic research on dating violence and incest, whereas in the West both dating violence and incest have already received much attention from researchers.5 In the 1970s, feminist scholars began to challenge incest prohibition theories and refuted the idea that incest was a rare occurrence, arguing that the only taboo surrounding incest was a prohibition against speaking about it, and regarding it as child sexual abuse (Fisher, 2003). At the beginning of the 1980s, dating violence was recognized as a social problem (Makepeace, 1981, 1983, 1989; Sugarman & Hotaling, 1989, 1991). In recent years, a few Chinese scholars (Ai, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c; Pan & Yang, 2004) have begun to study sexual coercion and rape in dating relationships,6 but incest is still a taboo subject in Chinese academia. We used incest as a keyword to conduct a database search of four major Chinese research databases7 and found not a single article or dissertation related to the subject. Compared to researchers, journalists (e.g., Wang, 2003; Zhang, 2003) have been more attentive to child sexual abuse, but most of the reports of child sexual abuse perpetuate the myth that the family is a safe place and that the perpetrators of such abuse are only ever strangers or teachers.8 Feminist theory is an important approach to both the advancement of social movements and academic research on violence against women. Second-wave feminists have


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organized consciousness-raising (CR) groups to help women “speak out” (Alcoff & Gray, 1993; Mardorossian, 2002; Naples, 2003), and analyze dating violence (DeKeseredy, 1989; DeKeseredy & Kelly, 1995) and incest as abuses of male power that occur as a result of a patriarchal society. Within this theoretical framework, the almost exclusive focus is on the suffering of the “victims” and the application of the trauma paradigm to explore such consequences as depression, anxiety, low selfesteem, feelings of isolation and stigmatization, revictimization, substance abuse, and sexual difficulties (Armsworth & Stronck, 1999; Denov, 2004; Gilfus, 1999; Lubell & Peterson, 1998; Rachman, 2000). These feminists validate the psychological injury that results from being abused, empower women politically, and educate the society at large about this dimension of violence against women, but they also create a dominant, stereotypical, expert institutional discourse of “rapist father and abused daughter” or “abusive boyfriend and abused girlfriend,” and, more generally, of “men exercising power over women” (Lamb, 1999, p. 4). This discourse tends to deprive the “victims” of “authority regarding the complexity of their own experience and may inadvertently reinforce viewing audience presuppositions that violence is an event that women cannot prevent, recover from, or explain without expert advocacy” (Hengehold, 2000, p. 194). It also fails to recognize the strengths that “victims” often exhibit “in the face of extreme injury and develop in the process of surviving” (Gilfus, 1999, p. 12). To investigate the case in this article, we depart from the second-wave feminists and adopt the theory and standpoint of third-wave feminists. Third-wave feminists tend to use the term survivor (Alcoff & Gray, 1993; Bass & Davis, 1994; Gilfus, 1999; Hengehold, 2000; Naples, 2003) in place of victim in the abuse situation, because “victims are often presented as trapped, and survivors, conversely, are shown as making choices[;] they are constructed in ways that place them at opposite poles of an agency continuum” (Dunn, 2005, p. 2). Compared to the word victim, the term survivor makes visible the two sides of women’s lives: One is a passive picture of their victimization, and the other an active and positive script in which women resist, cope, and survive. Third-wave feminists highlight women’s agency and resistance to cope with their experience of being abused, and shift the research emphasis from attending to the pathology of abused women to theorizing the complicated experiences of women that are embedded and constructed socially and historically (Burman, 1996; Certeau, Giard, Mayol, & Tomasik, 1998; Crossley, 2000; Foucault, 1976; Gutting, 2002; Ho, 2001; Ho & Tsang, 2005; Ho, Wong, & Cheng, 2005; Ho, 2007; McNay, 1992; Weedon, 1997). Just as Smith (1987, 1990) treated the body as a site of subjectivity, so too in this article body and linghun are highlighted as sites of resistance, because the two words are key concepts that occur throughout the transcription of the interview and Meng Xi’s diary.9 In literature, many authors have used the English word soul as a translation of the Chinese character for linghun (Yan, 2002). These words, however, have different meanings in different contexts: Soul has a deeply religious association that is strongly connected with notions of the afterlife, whereas linghun is a form of “intelligence soul”

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(Reinders, 2004) and emphasizes the essence of a human being or society, with its freedom of will and independent spirit. Linghun as used by Meng Xi not only is a personal vocabular preference but also indicates a profound significance within the Chinese social context.10 In China, studies on the human body are dominated by research in literature (Kubin, 1993; Liu, 1994), art (Anagnost, 1994; Hay, 1994), and history (Carlitz, 1994), and there is a lack of sociological studies of the body. In the West, since the concept of the “docile body” was raised by Michel Foucault (1976, 1980), many feminists have tried to develop body theories (Butler, 1990, 1993; Fournier, 2002; McNay, 1992; Shilling, 2003),11 but in all of these theories, the body is an abstract theoretical concept rather than a concrete experience having an archetypal private sphere association with women. Empirical studies in this area have been overlooked. In general, Chinese society has not formulated a clear understanding of all the dimensions of violence against women, especially incest and dating violence, and there are almost no channels through which women can raise consciousness or speak out. Thus, Meng Xi’s personal narrative of her experience of incest and dating violence is especially valuable. This article, as a sociological empirical study that focuses on the two sensitive topics of incest and dating violence, regards Meng Xi as a “survivor” rather than a “victim,” and analyzes her survival (resistance) strategies and the connection between body and linghun.

Interview and Data Analysis The case study is a part of a project of ours on dating violence in Beijing. Among the 41 interviews that were conducted, this case stands out because of its complexity, and because it shows how a Chinese woman is able to make sense of her own experience of father–daughter incest and dating relationships. It also reveals a typical young Chinese woman’s resistance in violent dating relationships. Although Meng Xi, as a young, middle-class, urban woman, does not reflect the full diversity of those who experience dating violence, her narrative does capture many underlying similarities in the dating lives of young Chinese people. Furthermore, because the article details a case study of one woman, all the dimensions of her dating life are included, both violent and nonviolent. The analysis relies primarily on an in-depth 8-hour interview that was conducted in a single session12 with Meng Xi, her 22 online diary entries, and subsequent contact with her through e-mails and telephone calls. The interview was audiotaped and transcribed verbatim in Chinese. All of the quotations have been translated into English by us. Meng Xi responded to such open-ended probes as “Tell us your dating story,” which allowed her to construct the narrative in her own terms, and the story of incest emerged unexpectedly in the process. In the analysis of Meng Xi’s story, her experiences of incest and dating violence are presented in a linear form: The first part concerns the relationship with her father,


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and the second part her relationships with her boyfriends and lovers. (This arrangement is simply according to the sequence of different relationships and does not imply a logic of causality.) Body and linghun are highlighted as sites through which she has developed a resistance to cope with the child sexual abuse and dating violence, gains a sense of control from her relationships with different men, and constructs and reconstructs herself. This is an invaluable text about a young Chinese woman’s subjective experience that connects two topics: dating violence and incest. Meng Xi’s story, like all “personal tellings” (Krieger, 1985), is both a retrospective reconstruction of her life experience and a personal construction of the contemporary social context, in this case in China.

Five Strategies of Resistance In Meng Xi’s account of the father–daughter incest and “violent” dating relationships that she has experienced, she often refers to two important domains of her existence: body and linghun. Five strategies of resistance are identified in the way she deals with the interplay between her body and linghun. Use of body-linghun split to trivialize the harm of the experience of incest. Feminists have often used Foucault’s terms of juridico-discursive and disciplinary power to describe father–daughter incest when referring to the unequal power relation that “imprisons” the abused (Bell, 1993). According to Bell (1993), the position of a father gives him authority that his children are expected to obey, or “the rule of the father (as the sovereign of the family) over the powerless and therefore obedient child” (p. 63). In Meng Xi’s relationship with her father, she is sometimes an “obedient child.” He also displays such behavior [sexual harassment] toward his students, but it’s different— as a professor, he has many students and many chances, but he feels that it is perfectly safe to insult me, because I am the most stupid and obedient one. (Emphasis added by the authors in this and the following quotations)

To trivialize the harm of the experience of incest, rescue the powerlessness of her body, and purge away the guilt of bodily pleasure, Meng Xi uses the strategy of splitting body and linghun as a means of resistance to being victimized. Meng Xi speaks of pleasure and torture in terms of body and linghun: On one hand, she feels desire “when my body says yes,” and on the other hand, she feels that her linghun is being tortured. She knows that she must make a choice between bodily pleasure and tortured linghun, and finally her body-linghun split becomes a way out. Meng Xi uses the phrase “The body is not important” as a way to comfort herself, as if to say, “Since it’s not important, the hurt will not be a big deal.” The torture of the soul (kaowen linghun) is a cultural term that was inspired by Lu Xun,13 and it implies that

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subordinated subjects question themselves as to whether to take action to resist and finally stand up to resist oppression. Lu Xun used it in the context of antagonism, whereas Meng Xi borrows the concept to express how precious linghun is for her. When her father pushed her to accept that she experienced bodily pleasure when he sexually assaulted her, this challenges the purity of her linghun and is the most hurtful memory of the incestuous abuse. When Meng Xi spoke of the experience of being asked by her father, “Do you enjoy it?” she was very angry: I accept that part of my body likes it, but the whole thing is wrong. Why do you ask me a question like this? You want my body, OK, you take it, I don’t care, but you even want my linghun. What you want is to destroy me.

This quote clearly shows Meng Xi’s construction of the power relationship with her father. First, she acknowledges bodily desire, but at the same time she shows a clear rejection of the injustice of the incest. Why is the whole thing wrong? She offers the explanation of the “wrong” body, which implies that if the body were another woman’s body, then the pleasure would be whole, rather than partial. Second, the body-linghun split is a way for her to trivialize the harm, and she uses the renunciation of the ownership of her body as a strategy to maintain the purity of her linghun. Third, when the last possession of her pure linghun is challenged by her father, she feels as if she is being destroyed. Compared to physical and sexual abuse, the “spiritual violation” is even more painful. Spiritual violation is seldom discussed by other scholars, but it is an important theme that emerges in this case and thus needs to be further studied in the future. In Chinese traditional culture, the physical body seems to be graded lower than the linghun (Yan, 2002). Thus, it is not a surprise to find that Meng Xi unconsciously borrows Lu Xun’s concept, internalizes traditional Chinese cultural arguments about body and linghun, and takes spiritual violation more seriously than physical or sexual violence. In Meng Xi’s account of the relationship between her body and linghun, she not only engages in the denigration of her body and the elevation of her linghun, but also has her own way of favoring the importance of the purity of her linghun over that of her body, even while acknowledging that her bodily experience included the pleasure of sex within the father–daughter incest. Acknowledgment of bodily desire even in father–daughter incest. What distinguishes this story from others is that Meng Xi bravely acknowledges the pleasure that was felt by her body during incidents of father–daughter incest, while roundly condemning her father’s behavior as a violation not just of her body but also of her linghun. I know all the things are wrong, but it’s difficult for me to—you know, it’s natural for the body to have desires, but what he did really hurt me. Later, I mean, after I got a hold on my mind, I told him, “If you dare do it again, I will slap you.”


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Much of the literature shows that the experience of sexual violence often “breaks the relationship of the ‘victim-subject’ to her own pleasure” (MacCannell & MacCannell, 1993, p. 224),14 which is typical of the discourse on sexually abused women that holds that once a victim, always a victim. Meng Xi’s case, however, refutes this argument and shows an alternative story that acknowledges asymmetries of power without sentimentalizing or desexualizing the female child (Allison, 1992; Doane & Devon, 2001; Naples, 2003; Sapphire, 1996). Mainstream feminist analyses of incest are not based on listening to pleasure15 but rather on listening to pain (Denov, 2004; Koss, 1988, 1989; Koss & Oros, 1982; Tang, 2002). This article, however, argues that Meng Xi’s courage to acknowledge bodily desire while condemning her father’s immoral behavior is a powerful means of resistance. In China, acknowledging the bodily desire of women has become acceptable only in the past 20 years. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the government’s official position was that Chinese women and men were equal, but this equality meant that men and women were substantially the same (Liu, 1993; Meng, 1993). The requirements of sameness, or nondifference, between the two sexes neglected the bodies of Chinese women,16 and, therefore, “I don’t care about my bodily desire” became a collective discourse. Not until the 1980s did some female writers begin to write about the body and acknowledge the bodily desire and sexuality of women (Kubin, 1993; Liu, 1993).17 In the past few years, more and more women writers, most of whom were born in the 1970s,18 have adopted an avant-garde mode of writing, and “[T]heir writing is not just their laying bare ‘women’s real experiences,’ their youth, or their gender, but their unabashed sexuality” (Ferry, 2003b, p. 656). This article will not go into detail about the relationship between women writers and the bodily desire of women in China, but Meng Xi’s awareness of her body reflects the awakening of the collective consciousness of Chinese women of their bodily desire. Furthermore, Meng Xi’s acknowledgment of bodily desire is also a product of the social context in which she lives. According to Ferry (2003b), “[W]omen’s desire and sexuality in the twentieth century [were] tied to larger issues of cultural identity and modernity” (p. 657). Indeed, the desire of women in contemporary Chinese society is closely connected to the policy of opening up, the development of the economy, the modernization of China, and the globalization of the world (Farrer, 2002; Ferry, 2003a; Johansson, 1999; Knight, 2003; Weber, 2002). These conditions seem to have created a space for Chinese women to construct their own identities, complex and diverse images of women, and new dating and sexual lifestyles. It seems that they have more freedom, are learning more about Western feminism (Milwertz & Bu, 2005), and have clearer standards of success and expectations of the future; they should, therefore, be more assertive and confident. On the inside, however, they are more anxious and uncertain. All of these cultural deployments and historical developments in the desire of Chinese women are partly imprinted in Meng Xi’s personal experience. From her experience of father–daughter incest, Meng Xi is trying to construct an abstract power of linghun, but the power that she struggles for in her dating relationships

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turns out to be more concrete. In the relationship with her father, Meng Xi began to acknowledge her own bodily desire. At the same time, however, her father’s power turned her body into an object of seduction and an entity that was filled with inferiority and guilt. In her dating relationships, however, her bodily desires found a new space for release and expression. “I always use linghun to persuade my body not to do something at first and then use the body to subvert the linghun.” What Meng Xi says vividly demonstrates the struggle between body and linghun in her dating and sexual life. Body and linghun become battlefields on which she exerts, conforms to, competes with, and resists power. Choice of skin color: The power of the body. At different stages, Meng Xi has had various boyfriends and sexual partners of different skin color, including Chinese, Black, and White men, and she expresses the power of her body through the choices she makes about the skin color of her boyfriends and lovers. Meng Xi seeks out intimate experiences with Black men not only to assert her sexual appeal as a woman but also as a way to assert her own “ethnic” superiority, thus transforming the body from a physical entity into a symbolic marker. At one point, Meng Xi dated a German; she narrates the situation as follows: When I was with him, I always felt that I tolerated him unconsciously [because of the notions of Western superiority]. But you got compensated. When I was going out with him, I felt proud and did not feel any pressure.

At the time of the interview, she was dating an African American. In the following excerpt, Meng Xi also explains the pressures that are associated with dating Black men in China: In the world, 90% of people discriminate according to race. In the Bar Street,19 when I walk with him, all of the men look at me as if I were a chicken.20

In Western psychological tradition, the Freudian notion of “the gaze” theorizes voyeuristic desire as a form of sadistic mastery over a masochistic object (Freud, 1977). Meanwhile, Foucault’s “gaze” has two dimensions: The figure of authority turns its gaze on the “victim,” and the “victim” looks back (cited in MacCannell & MacCannell, 1993). The “look” that is given in public, especially by many men to one woman, initiates two encounters that construct two different power spaces of “in public” and “in private.” Meng Xi’s experience with her German boyfriend offered her so-called public pride and private inferiority, whereas her experience with Black men resulted in a discriminatory public gaze and private superiority. Although the classification of skin color (White or Black) is a manifestation of an archetypal dominant power role, Meng Xi’s version of “looking back” is to choose to be intimate with Black men. This appears to be an action of resistance, because in the competition between “public pride” and “private power,” she chooses private power.


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My body shape is also an important factor. I have an “Oriental” face and a plump figure. They [Black men] are more stimulated by and attracted to my body shape. In the beginning, I chose him just because it was easy for me to control him. In fact, they [Black men] are easy. They are lonely. If they get a chance, they will hang on to you. They are easy, and I don’t want to waste my time.

Although the male gaze is perceived as a threat to her subjectivity, her returning the gaze reinforces her desire to bring about a new sense of self and to regain the power that she lost in the relationship with her father. She expresses the power of her body in two ways. On one hand, she turns her “Oriental” face into a symbolic marker to attract non-Chinese men, especially Black men, and on the other hand, she transforms the meaning of “cheap” into “easy” with the conception that if the process of finding a partner becomes easy, then obtaining sexual satisfaction becomes easy. In this case, the choice of skin color not only expresses corporal power but also induces an expectation of love. I want to have perfect love—the most important thing is to find the same linghun. In this world, you have little chance of finding a man with the same linghun. If I happen to meet someone with the same linghun, then I won’t care about their other qualities.

Meng Xi’s story reflects the power struggle of contemporary Chinese women under globalization. Since China opened up, more instances of transnational dating and marriage have emerged (Farrer, 2002). Young Chinese women use the physical body as a weapon to gain power in transnational dating relationships through the choices of their partners’ skin color and through making use of their “Oriental” face. Nevertheless, this seemingly subjective process unconsciously submits to the dichotomy of White-Black and Orientalism in the materialist society that has emerged under globalization, which is too powerful to resist. The story also suggests that young Chinese women emphasize the importance of the “same linghun” to trivialize individual insufficiency in a consumerist society, and thus the placing of the search for the “same linghun” at the core of dating is an idealized and spiritual concept of resistance, and one that is even superior to love. Searching for a man with the same linghun becomes the ultimate purpose of Meng Xi’s everyday dating life, in which a materialistic body places hope in linghun to testify to “true love” and a body that has been disciplined by different power relationships hopes to borrow the strength of linghun to show its resistance. In urban Beijing, the context of dating is hyperactive but does not have enough freedom, and the choice is essentially between submission to the extremely materialistic society or the use of extreme spiritual strength to resist it. This is a woman’s dilemma in contemporary urban China. From harming herself to harming others. There is a Chinese phrase that describes how women deal with conflicts in intimate relationships: “tears, words, suicides.”21 As Meng Xi’s poem reveals, she has forgotten “how to cry,” so she naturally adopts

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the two other tactics: words and suicides. Nevertheless, her practices create new problems. In the narrative, it appears that Meng Xi usually uses these two tactics before the breakup of a relationship, especially when her boyfriends want to break up with her but she does not agree. “Keep calling” is her preferred tactic with “words,” but the outcome of this practice is sometimes hurtful and unexpected. When her second boyfriend wanted to break up with her, she repeatedly called him to the point of annoyance. One day, she called him when he was having dinner with friends. He proceeded to transfer his mobile around the table and asked his friends to verbally humiliate her one by one on the phone. After the call, Meng Xi never called him again, and they finally broke up. For Meng Xi, “self-harm” or “attempted suicide” is a typical tactic to gain power. Because I knew that he [her first boyfriend] is warmhearted, when I cannot control him, I would make him upset by harming myself. I know it’s bad, but I turned on the gas, tried to jump off a ninth-floor balcony, and cut my wrists. But every time, to be honest, I didn’t want [to die]. I was very clear about it, but I could not control my feelings, which were so strong. Maybe I just wanted to upset myself and make myself wake up. I want to know where my limit is. But the people around me cannot endure this behavior.

In the Chinese context, the happy ending to “tears, words, suicides” can be manifested in two ways. One is the woman’s success through the display of emotional dependence with the intention to control, and the other is the man’s submission through his conceding. Lempert (1994) argued that both words and suicides could be understood as acts of autonomy and to “wrest control of herself and the power” (p. 433). Both are bodily acts of pretending to be “crazy” but actually being purposefully rational, and are painful performances of the tormented body and linghun, those self-expressions of Meng Xi’s early dating life. In her later dating life, Meng Xi changed her strategies to gain power and learned to inflict pain on her dating partners for her own psychological and sexual pleasure, finally discarding the tactics of “tears, words, suicides.” Meng Xi narrates a story of pleasure and how her Black boyfriend tolerates bodily pain to show his love for her: I’m a little bit into S&M, you know. When I make love, sometimes I want to bite. He is a sunny, healthy type of man who avoids and escapes bodily pain by nature. When I feel his avoidance, I try not to do it again, but when he feels my restraint he hides his own feelings of pain. These are tiny and subtle feelings, but they are very meaningful to me.

In her stories of attempted suicides and S&M, the common theme is not pain but the idea of control, of dominance and submission. Meng Xi wants to gain a feeling of control, but the recipient of the pain changes: In the story of her attempted suicides, the pain is her own, but in the story of S&M, the pain of her partners stimulates pleasure in her body. In her early dating life, Meng Xi victimized herself to gain


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power, whereas in her later dating life, she has made use of her own aggression to gain power. “I don’t care”: Interpreting sexual practice to justify sexual coercion. Sexual practice is one of the most important sites of bodily interaction in everyday dating life. Although Meng Xi emphasizes that she has not encountered other sexual violence in her life except incest, this is not backed up by her narrative. She depicts the sexual coercion she has experienced in the following way: Sex is just a series of acts. Who cares? He fucks me, gives me pain. I don’t do anything to resist. He knows that I’m in pain, but he just doesn’t stop. I want to hit him, but I know I cannot overpower him, so I give up. It is not important.

In the narrative, “it” is not clear; what is it that she gives up? In the following quotation, she offers a further explanation: Even if he is not a good guy, what can I lose? Reputation I don’t want. Sex I don’t take seriously. Then, what do I care about? Generally speaking, I have met some people who treated me like a sex object and harmed me sexually, but as I don’t care, it doesn’t cause what they would call “harm.”

In the situation of unwanted sex, it seems that the “I don’t care” attitude makes her assume a passive and submissive role and allows the perpetrators to dominate, but in her narrative she attempts to use the “I don’t care” attitude as a positive strategy for dealing with a sexual relationship. First, “I don’t care” can be a way to relieve herself of a man she does not like. If the man is not a good guy, then all he wants is sex. I know I am not very pretty, so OK, you can get it, then you can go away and we don’t need to see each other anymore.

Second, “I don’t care” enables her to use sex to test whether a man’s love is real. Most men behave differently before and after sex. Sometimes, having sex with them once can remove their disguise. Some bad guys have the naïve idea that after women sleep with them, they can do whatever they want. Most women comply. But it depends— you know, I’m different.

In the first of these narratives, she changes her role from that of a “passive victim” of sexual violence to that of an “active agent” in a dating relationship by choosing whether she likes her partner through her bodily practice. We can trace the “I don’t care” statement back to her salvation strategy of splitting the body and linghun in the father–daughter incest. Her body rids itself of the feelings of guilt and powerlessness, and gains new strength in the dating relationships. This new strength has been labeled by Meng Xi’s friends as “revenge,” but is defined by Meng Xi as “searching

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for true love,”22 which is always closely accompanied by liberal sexual practices. Thus, Meng Xi interprets her sexual practice to justify sexual coercion and learns to understand sexual coercion as a rougher form of sex, thus trivializing the “violence” that is involved. Gil and Anderson (1999) carried out a case study of a Chinese rape survivor and argued that “the burden of Confucian obligation and familism makes her yet again a victim, this time shouldering the responsibility of family honor and shame, despite her own emotional or physical pain “ (p. 1166). Their study shows that research on violence in China has inherited the ideology of Confucian ideas (Hester, 2004) to explain women’s experience of being abused. We argue, however, that the influence of Confucian ideas in China has declined due to a challenge from two modes of thought: the communist ideology of the government, and “global capital and international fashions and ideologies” (Dirlik & Zhang, 2000, p. 6). Meng Xi’s case is a vivid example of how a contemporary urban Chinese woman can be influenced by discourses of modernity and globalization. “I don’t care” is a symbol of transition between the collective discourse of the “I don’t care about bodily desire” of prosocialist society and the personal statement of “I don’t care about the public gaze” of everyday dating life in postsocialist China. Her choice of skin color in her boyfriends and lovers, her transition from harming herself to harming others, and her active sexual practice have built up a large platform for the deployment of her bodily desire, which belongs not only to her but also to many women of her generation. A further illustration of this can be found in Larson (2000): China is a particularly interesting case to use in evaluating the discourse of desire and its global unfolding. Because China’s recent past has demanded revolutionary zest from the state down to the person, the positing of desire as foundational to the will of the person rather than of the state, desire’s radically antistatist refusal or ideological explanation, and the desire’s privileging of the body—especially the female body—as a site of pleasure and resistance appear in a post-revolutionary context to be even more powerful as provocative and libratory propositions. (p. 215)

Conclusion Although an account of one young woman’s experience of incest and dating violence cannot by itself speak of a national condition, this article contributes to the understanding of women’s resistance to victimization in power relationships. In Meng Xi’s case, in the face of abusive situations she uses different strategies to resist and to regain power, thereby putting herself in a more advantageous situation. This study offers the new perspective of studying resistance through the interplay of body and linghun. In the father–daughter incest, when her body was powerless, Meng Xi used the split between body and linghun to construct a strong linghun to


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save her body. In her dating relationships, her body shook off the feeling of insufficiency and guilt and became gradually powerful. From acknowledging her bodily desire in father–daughter incest to fully displaying it in her dating relationships, Meng Xi’s consciousness of her bodily desire is consistent with the development of the desire of many Chinese women in post–Cultural Revolution China. Meng Xi’s resistance sheds light on the desire and sexuality of Chinese women in contemporary society, and especially their struggle between spiritual and material pursuits. This study offers some insight for further studies on both incest and dating violence. Meng Xi emphasizes that her suffering in the father–daughter incest grew from spiritual violation rather than sexual abuse. Here, spiritual violation can be understood as the abuser challenging the purity of her linghun, robbing her of dignity, and preventing her from seeing herself as a worthy human being. Spiritual violation is a new concept that is different from the traditional classification of physical, sexual, emotional (psychological), and verbal violence in violence research, but we still need to identify the similarities and differences between emotional (psychological) violence and spiritual violation in future studies. In her dating relationships, Meng Xi mentions her own aggressive behaviors, such as the use of active attacks, which differs sharply from the stereotypical image of passive battered women in violence research in China (Tang, Critelli, & Porter, 1995; Tang et al., 2002; Wang, 1999). Our project on dating violence in Beijing has revealed that the aggression of women is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored (Wang & Ho, 2007). Of the 41 informants in the project, 10 of the 29 female informants referred to their own violent behavior in dating relationships, and 6 of the 12 male informants said that their girlfriends had displayed some kind of aggressive behavior. Although it is not within the scope of this article to go into detail about the aggression of Chinese women, it is clearly a phenomenon that needs to be studied further.

Notes 1. A pseudonym. 2. For the purpose of poetic fluency, we have translated the Chinese character linghun into soul. Later, we will give a more detailed explanation of the difference between linghun and soul. 3. The poem was originally a song lyric; the title and singer are unknown. The English version of the poem was translated by us. Internet ID means the electronic signature that is attached to each of Meng Xi’s online diary entries or articles. 4. In the interview, she clarified the difference between boyfriends and lovers: Boyfriend means that she gives them the power to discipline and control her, whereas lover means that they are together just for fun, with no past and no future. 5. The situation is quite different from the impression that the first author got from her personal experience as a volunteer counselor on the youth hotline in Beijing between 1998 and 2002 that the phenomena of dating violence and incest are not rare. 6. Pan and Yang (2004) carried out a survey of attitudes on sex and sexual behavior among university students, and found that most sexual coercion is exerted by friends and dating partners. Ai, a feminist scholar and activist, has written many articles, has organized her students to perform the play The Vagina Monologues, and promotes the social movement against rape.

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7. The four databases are the CAJ Full-Text Database (CJFD, 1994-2005), China Core Newspaper Database (CCND, 2000-2005), China Doctoral/Master’s Dissertations Full-Text Database (CDMD, 19992005), and China Proceedings of Conferences Database (CPCD, 1999-2005). 8. According to Wang (2003), from January 2002 to June 2003, 36 cases of child sexual abuse were publicly reported through various media in China, in which most of the perpetrators were teachers, acquaintances, distant relatives, and strangers. No cases of incest were reported. 9. In the interview transcription, the term body appears 25 times and the term linghun appears 27 times. In her 22 diary entries, body appears 5 times and linghun appears 15 times. 10. In post–Cultural Revolution China, the issue of linghun has twice started a heated debate. The first occasion was at the end of the 1970s, when the famous writer Zhang Xianliang’s novel Ling yu Rou (Body and Linghun; Zhang, 1982) and his famous speech, “After 20 years of silence, we lick our wounds,” symbolized the struggle among lost subjectivity, the nationalized body, and linghun. The other occasion was 1989, when there was a popular debate among young people all over the country as to whether China should follow the Western path of capitalist liberalism or preserve the national policy of “cultivation of both material and spiritual civilizations.” In the Chinese social context, the word linghun has become a mirror that reflects the social dilemma between spiritual and material pursuits (Liu, 1998). 11. These feminists have developed body theories in various ways by emphasizing the significance of gender in the play of power and the way in which the body is a site of subjectivity. 12. The first author interviewed Meng Xi at a branch of Starbucks in the Chaoyang district of Beijing. The interviewer met her at 7 p.m., and they talked until midnight, when Starbucks closed. Meng Xi had thought that her boyfriend would come to pick her up after the interview, but he did not show up. She did not know where to go because her home was far away from this branch of Starbucks, which was near her work, so the interviewer invited her to come to her place. They ate ice cream and continued the interview until 4 a.m. 13. Lu Xun (1881-1936) was a great Chinese writer, thinker, and revolutionary. See http://www .shuku.net/novels/luxun/luxun.html (Shuku.net, 1997-1999). 14. MacCannell and MacCannell (1993) stated that the relationship between sexually abused women and their own pleasure is one of only being able to find pleasure through similar abusive experiences because they have lost their ability to attain pleasure. 15. According to MacCannell and MacCannell (1993), parts of the survivor’s story may refer to physical pleasure, but the “pleasure” is awkward, confusing, and imprisoning, and may serve to make a woman feel guilty and implicated. 16. A simple and famous example is women and men dressing identically during the Cultural Revolution. 17. Wang Anyi, a famous Chinese female writer, began to experiment with eroticism, subjectivity, and socially transgressive themes in the early 1980s. She explored sexuality and female subjectivity as a means of testing the limits of reality and the boundaries of human consciousness (Liu, 1993). 18. Writers often named as part of this group include Weihui, Mianmian, and Muzhimei. 19. San Li Tun in Beijing. 20. Chicken means prostitute. Meng Xi also said, “If Chinese men knew that I had had Black boyfriends before, they would not want me to be their girlfriend.” She offers two reasons for this. One is racial discrimination: Because she has been with Black men, she has become “dirty” from the point of view of Chinese men. The other is that she thinks that Chinese men feel sexually inferior to Black men. 21. Yi ku, er nao, san shang diao. The phrase puts women in the position of the disadvantaged. The three different forms of behavior are the expression of pain and a strategy to gain power in intimate relationships. Women know that shi ruo (making use of the position of the disadvantaged) is a useful strategy in a power struggle that can make men give in, albeit temporarily. 22. In the interview, Meng Xi said, “Even a close friend misunderstood me and asked me whether what I wanted was revenge. Ha ha, she thinks I hate men and want revenge. Ha, ha, I do not—I really do not.”


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Xiying Wang is a 985 researcher and lecturer in the Institute of Social Development and Public Policy at Beijing Normal University. She received her PhD from the Department of Social Work and Social Administration at the University of Hong Kong. Her research and teaching interests include Chinese women's studies, gender politics and human sexuality, feminist theory, qualitative research methods, violence against women, medical anthropology, and public health. Petula Sik Ying Ho, PhD, is an associate professor at the Department of Social Work and Social Administration, University of Hong Kong. She teaches human sexuality, body politics, social work methods, and qualitative research. Dr. Ho's current writing projects include gender and sexuality of women in Hong Kong and other Chinese communities.