Backward Glances is a study of the conceptualization of female homoerotic relations in mainstream Chinese cultures. The first chapter traces the origins of the understanding of sexual relations between women to writings of the 1920s, and the remainder of the book focuses on literary, television, and film works produced in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from the 1970s to the present.
While focusing on contemporary Chinese cultures, Fran Martin's work is in close dialogue with the queer theory recently produced in Western academia. Backward Glances draws on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's influential contention that modern Western understandings of homosexuality and heterosexuality are fraught with tensions between a minoritizing discourse, which holds that only a small fraction of the population is homosexual, and a universalizing view, which assumes that everyone is potentially homosexual. Martin convincingly argues that female same-sex relationships in contemporary Chinese cultures are imagined through a form of utopian...
