Ephemeral Households, Marvelous Things: Business, Gender, and Material Culture in "Flowers of Shanghai"

This article maps the unique social, gender, and material configurations in the courtesan houses of fin de siècle Shanghai by portraying Chinese sojourners' life in this dream "home." The male sojourners lacked comfortable, homelike lodgings, and as a result adopted courtesan houses not only as places for romantic liaisons but also as sites in which they could entertain friends and join broader social networks under circumstances more comfortable than their temporary lodgings. The courtesan houses were marked by a different sense of family organization, which merely masked their commercial nature, and a different set of gender roles, in which the courtesan challenged normative understandings of male and female. Finally, the new types of relationships between clients and courtesans were increasingly structured around material objects. This new urban culture, I argue, embodied a new consciousness of time, space, and materiality that constitutes a modernity distinctly different from the positivist conception of the modern marked by linear progress.