Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in 20th-Century Shanghai

Dangerous Pleasures is a history of Shanghai's prostitution industry, but it is also a work of history produced in the poststructuralist era. Drawing on the rich theoretical explorations, intellectual dialogues, and multiple perspectives of the second half of the twentieth century, the author was especially influenced by Marxism, feminist and gender studies, poststructuralism, and the concept of "subaltern groups" in postcolonial studies. She sees both her "historical sources" and the "history" she constructs as dialogues, negotiations, memories, constructions, and acts of creation within an extraordinarily vivid, complex, and open-ended "process."

Divided into five parts and fifteen chapters, Dangerous Pleasures examines how, over the century from the late Qing through the early 1990s, the issue of "prostitution" became entangled at every level with a rich field of meaning: national consciousness, political power relations, commercial and economic interests, policies for strengthening the nation, social reform, the national psyche, desire and fear, and the construction of gender, among other things. It became a highly significant 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. It was the first time the Association had given the award to a book about women's history outside the United States.