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Religion and sexual experience are deemed sensitive topics to research. I aim to elucidate how I used hairdressing as an activity during qualitative interviews to aid in researching the relationship between religious-cultural upbringing and women's sexual experiences in Northern Ireland. There has been little recognition of the subjective sexual experiences of adult women in Northern Ireland; this is partly due to the dominance of Roman Catholicism and Evangelical Fundamentalism's religious practices in the country and their promotion of morally conservative ideas around women's bodies and sexual activity. This, in turn, has allowed a moral, religious perspective on sexual activity to have a high level of significance for the individual in Northern Ireland and society, making it challenging to research. I will explore how \" doing hair\" during qualitative interviews can help to combat issues associated with researching sensitive topics using GOFFMAN's (1956) dramaturgical analysis and HOCHSCHILD's (1983) emotional labor concept. I argue that utilizing the routine performances between the hairdresser and client and \" flipping the script\" on the researcher/participant vs. hairdresser/client power relations can aid in the disclosure of the socially and culturally sensitive topics of religion and sexual experiences.

[...]of this joint publication arrangement and the editorial office's location in Beijing, the journal is subject to the full range of Chinese-government censorship. [...]what happens when it is no longer obvious where something was published and according to which rules? [...]in these straitened times, dependence on editorial and financial support may well lead other editors, academics, and publishing houses outside China to add their stamp of legitimacy to such censorship. The affirmation of academic independence is all the more important in the face of such pressures and at a moment in history when, in many other countries around the world, governments are silencing criticism and suppressing journalistic, judicial, and academic freedom.

This paper analyzes chao gubei 抄古碑 (transcribing ancient steles) as a significant obsession of Lu Xun’s prior to his becoming a famous writer in the May Fourth period. Striking moments in his literary works stemmed from this personal obsession. Even though Lu Xun’s transcribing of ancient steles can be considered a means to anesthetize himself, this paper argues that this act of transcription also serves to circumvent thinking and speech against the grain of the May Fourth period, when revolutionaries sought to facilitate the flow of thinking and speech in Chinese society by replacing the Chinese script with phonetic ones. After looking at Lu Xun’s transcribing of ancient steles, this paper examines how the purposelessness and materiality of this practice appears in Lu Xun’s fictional works, such as “A Madman’s Diary,” “Epitaph,” and “Kong Yiji.”

This paper examines the emerging phenomenon of creating new Chinese characters on the internet with a case study of the artist Li Xiaoguai’s work. First, it analyzes the aesthetics and sociopolitical significance of Li’s new characters and neologisms. It explores how the new characters, as an alternative translation, achieve their Austinian performative force through an iteration of the original official language, which is thus displaced and subverted; how the puns become double-voiced and double-signified utterances in the Bakhtinian sense of folk humor; and how the vulgarities are pervasively used as interjections and intensifiers to vent strong emotions in the struggle against the state’s anti-vulgarity and internet censorship campaigns. Second, it studies how Li’s characters are integrated into his artistic creations via comic blogging. It explores how his comic strips evoke carnivalesque laughter by satirizing social ills, officialdom, and the increasing gap between the Communist Party (CCP) and the people, the state and the family, and the privileged and the underprivileged.

Taiwan-based Mahua (Chinese-Malaysian) writer Ng Kim Chew (Huang Jinshu, 1967–) has questioned Mahua literature’s filiation to mainland Chinese literature through parodic depictions of look-alikes and resemblances involving the canonical May Fourth writer Yu Dafu and his sojourn in colonial Malaya. What critics view as Ng’s self-invention through negativity can be used to explore his strategic alliance with another mainland Chinese genealogy, that of the late-Qing philologist-rebel Zhang Taiyan and the “father” of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun. Ng provocatively claims that the late-Qing and postwar (or Cold War) Mahua intellectual and literary contexts are structurally resonant. His filiation with these two historically unrelated contexts in his essays, as well as his short fiction, over two decades is what I call his imaginative materialism of Chinese writing (wen). Using Ng’s recently published master’s thesis on Zhang Taiyan (2012), I focus on how Zhang’s role in the longer history of Chinese reflection on writing and semiotics shapes Ng’s fictional works on Malayan communism and his critique of Mahua literary history. Besides Zhang’s proposal for literary reform, I examine Ng’s allegorical reading of Zhang’s skepticism about oracle bone inscription, and what the “unearthing” of this ancient form of writing around the fall of empire means for Mahua people’s history and experience of the Asian Cold War. Ng refashions cultural essentialist Zhang’s Old Text Confucianism and “National Studies” toward new ends. Paradoxically, it is Ng’s deep engagement with the legibility of the classical Chinese past and the recurring theme of revolution and writing that defines his aesthetic modernity.