Backward Glances identifies some of the common female same-sex storylines in Chinese literary and visual texts with a view toward teasing out their significance in the identity formation of women in the Chinese-speaking world. The book makes a case for the “unsuspected centrality” of the “passionate love of one woman for another” through the recurrence of two female same-sex scenarios found across the Chinese-speaking world.

As the dominant form, Fran Martin identifies what she calls a “memorial mode of representation” enshrined in the ubiquitous “schoolgirl romance.” In this scenario, an adult woman recalls the forced termination of same-sex love between two school girls and dwells on the pain and regret associated with the transition to a hetero-marital arrangement, thus prompting Martin to coin the term “going in narrative” in contrast to a Western-style “coming out narrative.” Martin argues that this scenario is potentially presented as a universal experience for “any woman,” irrespective of what an adult woman's sexual commitments might be. Alternatively, in a second, less common narrative, the main protagonists exhibit secondary gender characteristics with one assuming feminine, the other masculine features. In this emplotment, this storyline takes a minoritizing stance towards the masculine character. Typically, a tomboy-like character on track to a permanent attachment to same-sex love is invariably disappeared through death, suicide, or some other plot device. Accordingly, this storyline converges on the “impossibility of lesbian futures,” while compulsively resurfacing in the present of the surviving feminine protagonist.

For both storylines, Martin seeks to query how these narratives affect the identity construction of the female consumers – both heterosexual and lesbian – in the Chinese-speaking world. In particular, she wants to establish to what extent such stories enable or stifle the public conceivability of love between women, whether or not they constitute a critique of the existing heteronormative imperative, and to what extent they point to a distinctive mode of heterosexuality among modern Chinese women. To that end, Martin offers a series of richly nuanced, attentively historicized, and carefully comparative readings of short stories of the literary and pulp variety, TV series, and film, focusing primarily on the period from the 1970s through the 2000s originating in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the PRC. At the same time she also discusses reader and audience responses to these texts.

In Chapter 1, Martin traces the emergence of these two patterns in Republican era fiction when Western sexology was introduced via the mediation of Japan and its culture of the single-sex “girls” culture on the one hand and the emergence of the narrative formula of modern love stories on the other. First she points to the seminal schoolgirl romances by Lu Yin and Ling Shuhua among others, arguing that these writers' use of the tragic-love story formula universalized rather than minoritized such experiences. Second, Martin locates the prehistory of the tomboy in one of Yu Dafu's stories that stigmatizes a woman, who exhibits a masculinized body and takes female lovers among others, as a monstrous literary personage who embodies the newly introduced Freudian notion of “perversion” more generally. In Chapter 2, Martin delineates the second wave of schoolgirl romances covering the 1970s through the 1990s. Through close readings of Chu T'ien-hsin's “Waves Scour the Sand” (1976) and Wong Bikwan's “She Is a Young Woman and So Am I” (1994), Martin concludes that these stories portray marriage not as a natural or sentimentalized outcome but rather as a “premature, violently enforced, and tragic truncation of the ‘real’ (same-sex romance) story” (p. 63). Through the use of the formula of tragic fiction, these stories constitute a critique of heteronormative accounts of romance. In Chapter 3, Martin situates Liu Suola's “Blue Sky Green Sea” (1985) in the context of the 1980s PRC debates on humanism. In a variant on the memorializing theme, Liu's narrative relies on the Freudian emplotment of “authentic desire repressed” to create an implicitly utopian space of authenticity for the same-sex romance between narrator and her deceased best friend. In Chapters 4 and 5, Martin turns to the literary and visual discourses surrounding the minoritized figure of the tomboy in Taiwan. Through analysis of pulp novels, popular fiction, and corresponding TV adaptations, Martin argues that melodramatic narratives of the tomboy create sympathy for the tomboy, while subscribing to an etiology of insufficient mothering to explain the formation of the tomboy. Through an examination of audience responses to the TV miniseries, Martin proposes the possibility of a mournful rather than melancholic formation of heterosexual femininity predicated upon the public, ritualized mourning over the forceful imposition of the hetero-marital imperative. In Chapter 6, Backward Glances explores the rewriting of the two main narratives in new lesbian-themed cinema primarily from 2000 onward from all three regions to make a case for the new insistence on the possibility of a present and a future for adult lesbian love, an argument most fully realized in the discussion of the Hong Kong film Butterfly (2004).

The book succeeds in demonstrating the importance of these recurrent narrative patterns as far as the contemporary cultural production of Taiwan and Hong Kong is concerned, even if the idea of the cultural “mainstream” is somewhat fuzzy and may not encompass all of the literary and visual texts discussed. Perhaps the most compelling case in that regard is the reception of Love Eterne in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1960s that the introductory chapter invokes. Contrary to Martin's assertion that the ill-starred love between Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai is the best-known love story in Chinese history, that place of honor prior to the twentieth century was surely occupied by the Xixiang ji (Story of the Western Wing), a heterosexual story set in a temple, rather than the Liang Zhu story that made a school the central locus of the protagonists' growing attachment to each other. Hence, the unquestionable popularity of the Liang Zhu story in twentieth-century Chinese cultural production underscores Martin's argument about the centrality of a youthful same-sex attachment in a modern context. However, when we closely compare both the production of the Liang Zhu story in the PRC's first color film (1953) with the Hong Kong Love Eterne (1962) rendition, we notice asymmetries in both the films themselves and in the audience response. Not only does the PRC version compress the school years to a condensed sequence of quickly alternating seasons, the interaction between the two protagonists is clearly coded as “female” and “male” through operatic and other conventions respectively, thus downplaying the same-sex aspect at either the level of the actor's body or the role-type in favor of a heterosexualizing scenario. By contrast, Ivy Ling Bo's performance in Love Eterne explores secondary gender through a conscious enjoyment of her maleness, an aspect exploited at great length in the extended school scenes. Similarly, in terms of audience, it was the women in Taiwan and Hong Kong that made Love Eterne not only a blockbuster, but a cult phenomenon for decades to come. Contrary to Martin's nuanced, yet persistent insistence on the transnational circulation of such narratives, Backward Glances makes a much more compelling argument for the popular significance of such narratives in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Accordingly, the case studies of literary and visual texts from the PRC discussed in Backward Glances do not exemplify the narrative patterns themselves or their popularity to the same degree. For one thing, none of the PRC texts and films Backward Glances discusses can confidently be classified as “mainstream.” As Martin herself notes, in China, even PRC feminist critics intent on constructing a genealogy of same-sex narrative have overlooked Liu Suola's “Blue Sky Green Sea”. For another, Li Yu, the producer of the first openly lesbian-themed PRC film Fish and Elephant and originally a CCTV documentary filmmaker, not only lost her job over her “underground” debut, but the film did not have an official release and is shown primarily in pirated copies, in contrast to the broadcasts of the Taiwan and Hong Kong films and TV series under discussion. Second, one of the strengths of Martin's methodology is her ability to incorporate ethnographic research, interviews, and internet-based audience responses to Taiwan and Hong Kong productions in arguing for the coexistence of universalizing and minoritizing readings of renditions of the “schoolgirl romance” among heterosexual and lesbian-identified women. However, similarly fine-grained evidence does not appear to be available from the PRC, the full-length interview with one of the openly lesbian actresses, Shi Tou, from Fish and Elephant and included in an appendix notwithstanding. Third, neither “Blue Sky Green Sea” nor the film Fish and Elephants denaturalize hetero-marital arrangements in the manner of the literary and visual texts from Taiwan and Hong Kong discussed in Backward Glances. Furthermore, none of the examples discussed from the PRC recuperate the tomboy as a site of the sympathetic gaze of the social collectivity and/or the loving gaze of the female lover despite the adoption of secondary gender as a lived experience among lesbian-identified women in the PRC. Hence, in terms of the quantitative and qualitative differences of female same-sex texts from the three Chinese-speaking regions, it seems less likely that such stories function as a universalizing discourse for a utopian phase of same-sex love in the constitution of female subjectivity in the PRC, nor does there seem to be cause to think that they instigate a form of public mourning among women for a purer, more spiritual kind of love in the face of a violent heteronormative system.

In sum, Backward Glances is an important and timely study of how cultural production intersects with female identity formation. The book will be a touchstone for further inquiries in the construction of both normative and queer female identities in the Chinese-speaking world. In its informed engagement with Western scholarship on gender, sexuality and the media, Martin sets an example of how to attend to historical localization while simultaneously opening up productive rather than reductive possibilities of transnational comparisons within and beyond the ken of the different Chinas.