Gender myth and disciplined sexuality in Geling Yan’s White Snake

Abstract

The memory of marginal subjects is a recurring theme in Chinese migrant novelist Geling Yan’s stories against the backdrop of Modern Chinese history, and it constitutes a narrative of ‘marginal memory’ in her novella White Snake (1998). In this study, I first investigate the multi-perspective narrative structure in Yan’s novella, concerning how private, marginal memory contradicts mainstream narratives of gender and sexuality. Secondly, I expound the memory of the body that mediates this marginal memory, regarding the fantasised body, the disciplined body, resistance, and emancipation of the body.