Ma Shaoling (Yale-NUS College)

The title of my book, The Stone and the Wireless, refers to two figures that bookend particular communicative imaginations of the late Qing in my study, but it is the properly intermediary chapter, one that both connects and divides the first and second halves of the book, which fully bears the weight of mediation that is my central argument. Women and what was deemed as the proper transmission of their feelings were not only appropriated as figurative means to the grander end of political and social transformations; they also cohered as literal, technical mediums, as exemplary female conduits. By comparing Huang Zunxian’s technological exploits of feminine, lyrical sentimentality with Qiu Jin’s “Self-Inscription on a Photograph,” this intermediary chapter attempts to retrieve women’s relationships to technology in ways that have not been co-opted by masculine-nationalist ideologies.