Nie Huaisang and masculinity

[superborb]

aka NHS is not particularly coded feminine in MDZS/CQL and I'd like to provide some context why!

I'm sure this has been pointed out before, but I'm not like, really ~with the youth~ aka how do people find meta post-LJ? So I don't know how redundant this post is... First, the caveat that obviously anyone can do what they want and headcanon whatever they want! These are just my thoughts!

I think people are mistaking NHS's love of art and fans as particularly feminine traits, which conflates Western ideals of femininity with what is happening. For reasons beyond the scope of this post, ancient China's ideals of masculinity rest on the ideal of a scholar -- the highest social class for much of imperial Chinese history served as officials and bureaucrats. (Of course, the perfect man was both martially AND academically inclined.) As a result, poetry, painting, these are /not/ coded feminine, because any true gentleman is a master of these arts. 

On the topic of fans, folding fans were commonly used as canvases, and so scholars would gift fans etc etc until decorated folding fans were a Big Deal. Some of the aesthetic hanfu blogs say folding fans are masculine and the stiff round fans are feminine, but I don't think this is broadly true through much of history? Like, yes, that is the association NOW, because a lot of dramas will give the young women the round fans and we see men with folding fans. But also there are lots of examples of historical folding fans that were designed to be carried by women, and the round fans predate the existence of folding fans. In any case, folding fans are not coded feminine and may even be a masculine accessory.

In conclusion, I have and will continue to happily read f!NHS and related fics, but mmm how to put it? If you're taking a textual reading of the canon, you need to do a bit more work to explain it?

Comments

[superborb]

Hmm, I can't think of anything that would be a slam dunk. I know there was a cultural shift where the scholar image was considered less masculine for a while, with the martial being emphasized and it's shifting back. So -- with a grain of salt here, since I'm just speculating -- being overly obsessed with appearance or extremely emotional would read like they were trying to make the character seem more feminine (in a bad way)?

[lirazel]

That's very interesting. In Western period stuff, there's several things that would absolutely female-code a character that I can think of, but maybe the gap in the West is just wider?

[superborb]

It's extremely likely that I'm just not fluent enough in the character tropes to identify them clearly

[lirazel]

Ah, yeah, that makes sense!