[Synopsis]
Dangerous Pleasures is a history of prostitution in Shanghai. Yet, as a work of history written in the poststructuralist era, it draws on the rich theoretical explorations, intellectual dialogues, and multiple perspectives of the latter half of the twentieth century. The author was particularly influenced by Marxism, feminism and gender studies, poststructuralism, and the concept of “subaltern groups” in postcolonial studies. She sees both historical sources and the “history” she produces as part of an extraordinarily vivid, complex, and open-ended “process” of dialogue, negotiation, remembrance, construction, and creation. Divided into five parts and fifteen chapters, Dangerous Pleasures examines how, over the century from the late Qing through the early 1990s, the question of prostitution became entangled on every level with national consciousness, political power relations, commercial and economic interests, nation-building policies, social reform, the national psyche, desire and fear, gender constructs, and other rich fields of meaning. It became a highly central symbol of China's politics, economy, history, and spiritual culture.
Dangerous Pleasures received the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for Women’s History from the American Historical Association, the first time the award was given to a work about women's history outside the United States.
