Fashioning Resistance: clothing, definitional authority, and female subjectivity in late Qing Shanghai pictorials, 1884 – 1912

Clothing served as an external site of gender discipline in imperial China, instrumentalized for moral indoctrination through female bodies. In the late Qing, Shanghai’s lithographic pictorials documented urban women’s fashion practices, yet their visual gazes betrayed the gazers’ own anxiety: as women entered public spaces, pictorial satire was deployed to shore up a vanishing gender order. As commercial visual products, these images had to mediate multiple field pressures alongside the creators’ intent. Consequently, male illustrators’ attempts to symbolically discipline women’s fashion paradoxically preserved evidence of rebellious sartorial choices: public unruliness, gender ambiguity, and class transgression. Although these women may not have identified as feminists, they collectively redistributed fashion’s definitional authority, reconstructing social identity through sartorial subversion. At a time when theoretical feminism was only beginning to take root, non-elite urban women used dress, a mundane everyday tool, in what amounted, in retrospect, to a spontaneous, grassroots feminist practice. This practice reveals a discourse of body politics: the resistance of fashion lies not in which items are worn but in who holds definitional authority. Through sustained negotiation with, and creative transformation of, external definitions, late Qing urban women began, this article argues, to construct their modern subjectivity by redefining ‘who I am.’