Gender Myth and Disciplined Sexuality in Geling Yan’s White Snake

Abstract

ABSTRACT The memory of marginal subjects is a recurring theme in Chinese migrant novelist Geling Yan’s stories against the backdrop of Modern Chinese history, and it constitutes a narrative of ‘marginal memory’ in her novella White Snake (1998). In this study, I first investigate the multi-perspective narrative structure in Yan’s novella, concerning how private, marginal memory contradicts mainstream narratives of gender and sexuality. Secondly, I expound the memory of the body that mediates this marginal memory, regarding the fantasised body, the disciplined body, resistance, and emancipation of the body. I discuss how gender stereotypes are challenged, gender performance is manipulated, and normalised sexuality is transgressed in power relations, in light of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler’s theories of body and gender politics. Finally, I investigate the ‘de-marginality’ that compromises the marginal position of sexual minorities and complicates the marginal memory. Overall, by conceptualising ‘marginal memory’ vis-à-vis public memory, I argue that the narrative of marginal memory being appropriated and silenced constitutes the alternative accounts to rethink historical and individual trauma. I propose that within Yan’s writing emerges a vision of marginality that champions the autonomy and creativity, which arises from queerness and trauma.