Presentation Schedule
On the Anatomy of Hygiene and the Technology of Monster in Xiao Hong’s Novels (103160)
Session Chair: Samuel Manickam
Wednesday, 17 June 2026 17:25
Session: Session 4
Room: Room 116 (1F)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
This study brings into conjunction two interpenetrating symbolic orders—hygiene and monstrosity—to interrogate the bodily semiotic in the fiction of Xiao Hong. Through a symptomatic reading of the “monstrous feminine” and its modes of production, it examines how Xiao’s narratives render the biopolitical management of gendered subjects in early twentieth-century China. The paper begins through the lens of “hygienic modernity,” dissecting the visual rhetoric, biopolitics, and national dialectic that emerge from the modern ideal of hygiene, and how these collectively construct a symbolic order predicated on boundary-making and exclusion of the other. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, the paper then turns to the visibly monstrous inscribed onto female bodies in Xiao Hong’s work. When national dialectic defines the modern female subject through ideals of cleanliness, health, and civility, Xiao Hong persistently writes the bodies cast outside of this symbolic order—“the abject” marked by leaky, inferiority, decay, parasitize, possessed, decay, and pregnancy: in short, the monstrous feminine. This paper argues that monstrosity, along with the affective economies it mobilizes—horror, disgust, abjection—is not a psychological given but a historically contingent and culturally constructed apparatus. Monstrosity is technologically invented, not discovered. As hygienic modernity seeks to repress, sanitize, or erase these bodies, Xiao’s fiction reactivates their presence by producing abjection itself—a zone of feminine excess that persistently unsettles the borderwork of the symbolic order.
Authors:
Chantal Ying-tung Chau, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
About the Presenter(s)
Ms Ying Tung Chau is a University Doctoral Student at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong
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