Abstract: | Front Matter -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Acknowledgements -- Figures -- The Chinese Imperial Model in the Southwest Borderland: Gender, Visuality and Transitions -- Gender Inversion and the Power of Representation: Imagining and Visualising Ethnic Minority Women’s Masculinity -- Dancing in the Moonlight: Fashioning Sexuality of Non-Han People -- Yiguan Zhuangmao 衣冠狀貌 (Clothes, Hat, and Physical Body): Materialising and Symbolising Human Variations -- Imperial Images? Rethinking Miao Albums and Ethnographic Photography -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Table of Miao Albums with Collection Date and Original Collector -- Back Matter -- Bibliography -- Index. This book explores the mutual constitutions of visuality and empire from the perspective of gender, probing how the lives of China’s ethnic minorities at the southwest frontiers were translated into images. Two sets of visual materials make up its core sources: the Miao album, a genre of ethnographic illustration depicting the daily lives of non-Han peoples in late imperial China, and the ethnographic photographs found in popular Republican-era periodicals. It highlights gender ideals within images and develops a set of “visual grammar” of depicting the non-Han. Casting new light on a spectrum of gendered themes, including femininity, masculinity, sexuality, love, body and clothing, the book examines how the power constructed through gender helped to define, order, popularise, celebrate and imagine possessions of empire |
