These women were called “self-combing women ( 自梳女).” It was a cultural custom where a woman would refuse marriage, swearing (heterosexual) celibacy.
Women could refuse marriage and instead work in silk factories to support themselves. At the time, the silk industry was primarily a women dominated industry. In one district of Guangdong, starting in the late Ming dynasty and early Qing dynasty the flourishing silk industry provided the opportunity for Shun Tak women to live independently outside of patrilineal society and traditional family structures. Southern China was a particular area with rich history. We have to understand that written record is generally skewed to the biases and prejudices of those chronicling history and their understanding of culture and society. Rather, it is more likely that such accounts had been ignored or overlooked. However, we cannot take the absence of evidence as an absence its existence. Historical accounts of lesbian love in Chinese culture were few and hard to find. We wanted it to be a believable and realistic love story. We did not want our story to be anachronistic. We wanted to create a lesbian love story set in Hong Kong in the 1980s. When we began our project, we worried about the authenticity of the story’s premise.
0 kommentar(er)
