Masculinity, Prostitution, and the Imaginary Northwest in Chinese Travel Writings About Shanxi and Western Inner Mongolia, 1920–1949

Abstract

This article considers travel writings by metropolitan men in Republican China about Shanxi and western Inner Mongolia as a case study to further explore the transformations and continuities of Chinese masculinities. Drawing upon a range of popular travel narratives, it shows that so-called “Worn-Out Shoes (poxie)” – women perceived as clandestine prostitutes – were a crucial part of an imagined landscape of the Northwest. It argues that these writings reveal continuities in normative masculine values, norms and practices, and the role of women in the configuration of masculinities amid significant social changes in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.