The human body, such as hair, serves as a prism through which historical and cultural contexts are effectively refracted. Despite its historical and cultural significance, the role of hair, however, remains curiously ...The human body, such as hair, serves as a prism through which historical and cultural contexts are effectively refracted. Despite its historical and cultural significance, the role of hair, however, remains curiously a marginalized subject among the renewed interests on the body in the academic fields. In this paper, the author attempts to politicize the queue from 3 perspectives： maintaining a certain prescribed hairstyle is a top-down gesture to construct national conformity; the boundary between Manchu and Han is invoked and reinvented through the battles surrounding the queue politic in late Qing and early Republic; the widespread debate between keeping the queue and cutting the queue at the turn of the 20th century epitomizes the haunting rhetoric of traditionalism and modernism pursuit of modernity in China.展开更多
文摘The human body, such as hair, serves as a prism through which historical and cultural contexts are effectively refracted. Despite its historical and cultural significance, the role of hair, however, remains curiously a marginalized subject among the renewed interests on the body in the academic fields. In this paper, the author attempts to politicize the queue from 3 perspectives： maintaining a certain prescribed hairstyle is a top-down gesture to construct national conformity; the boundary between Manchu and Han is invoked and reinvented through the battles surrounding the queue politic in late Qing and early Republic; the widespread debate between keeping the queue and cutting the queue at the turn of the 20th century epitomizes the haunting rhetoric of traditionalism and modernism pursuit of modernity in China.
