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Equipmentality as United Actor in Han Bo’s China Eastern Railway Poems and Questions of Female Agency
- philoSOPHIA
- State University of New York Press
- Volume 12, Numbers 1-2, 2022
- pp. 171-177
- 10.1353/phi.2022.0000
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
Trains, a representation of Western technology and civilization, entered China in the early twentieth century. Han Bo poeticizes this train-induced Chinese modernity and its ongoing processes by mobilizing female images and characters on, of, or around the train, itself a complex of technocultural material forces entering into the vision of the modern Chinese people both individually and collectively. This essay analyzes such a train of train images in two poems by Han Bo, “Modern Sexual Equipmentality” and “Mass-Murdering Equipmentality,” while providing a brief contextual and conceptual framework for understanding some of the literary and philosophical aspects of contemporary Chinese poetry with some focus on their gender dynamics.