2. Two Stage Sisters: Comrades, Almost a Love Story

Abstract

Chinese opera is a prime focus of Chapter 2, which analyzes Two Stage Sisters (Xie Jin, 1965), a film classic from socialist China based on the evolution of Shaoxing opera. Paying special attention to the tension between the film’s text as a political melodrama and its subtext, replete with homoerotic overtones, my analysis invokes a queer intervention that rewrites the historical “surplus” of homoeroticism back into the official history of the socialist “seventeen years” (1949-1966). My integration of the social history into the textual analysis represents an alternative historiography intended to counter the ahistorical tendency underlying certain queer reading practices.