The Women of Quyi

Drawing substantially on original ethnographic fieldwork from the 1980s and 1990s, Lawson demonstrates how the women of quyi - a community of Chinese female singers in Republican Tianjin - successfully negotiated their sexuality and vocality in performance. Owing to their role as third-person narrators, the women of quyi bridged the gender gap in Chinese performance, creating an androgynous persona that allowed them to showcase their voices on public stages; places that had been previously unwelcoming to conventional female performers. This is a story about female storytellers who sang their way to respectability and social change by minimizing their bodies to allow their voices to be heard.