The bottom-line of “sex education” : focusing on the Journal New Culture, edited by Zhang Jingsheng = “性育”的底线：以张竞生主编的《新文化》月刊为中心.

Abstract

This article explores and re-evaluates Zhang Jingsheng’s “Sex

Education” in his New Culture, which advocates controlling and

re-coding Chinese men’s and women’s “sex,” “gender,” and

“sexuality” by means of “knowledge/ power.” Zhang Jingsheng

accords great value to “eugenics” and “aesthetic sexual intercourse,”

including the “sex education,” based upon which he tries to make

improvements in Chinese people’s innate physical weakness and

“neither male nor female” “sex” characteristics; and with touted

“aesthetic education” on all of the basic aspects of life, he attempts

to remedy and correct the lacked or inverted masculinity and

femininity in Chinese men’s and women’s “gender.” He also

makes his comments on how to save and cure those “sex perverts”

identified in Chinese men’s and women’s “sexualities,” the

information of which he collected from and analyzed in the articles

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許維賢，新加坡南洋理工大學中文系助理教授。

solicited on the topic of Sexual Histories as well as the letters to

New Culture. Finally, this article compares New Culture with those

discourses or translated discourses on sexual difference published in

other Chinese magazines in the twenties, and concludes that New

Culture seems to have a group of writers holding “unified” opinions

on the issues of “homosexual love” and “sexual aesthetics” and

seems less tolerant of differing opinions than magazines like The

Chinese Educational Review, The Ladies’ Journal, and New Women.