Performing Gender: Ma Liuming’s Naked Body as a Site of Contention and Freedom

In 1993, Ma Liuming began performing under the name “Fen-Man Liuming,” when he staged Fen/Ma Liuming for a select group of local artists and critics at the East Village, an avant-garde artist community in Beijing. In this performance, Ma dressed himself in a floral-print dress and put on make-up. With his long hair, feminine makeup and naked body, along with his pseudonym, Ma creates a new persona that destabilizes the categories of gender. Positioning Ma’s performances in dialogue with the cultural, social, and political context of 1990s China, this paper investigates the ways in which Ma provokes, negotiates, and oscillates between the boundaries of male and female, public and private, and local and
global. Ma’s transgressive expression of gender in his performance challenges the hegemonic norm: What constitutes the hegemonic norm in 1990s China? How does Ma’s work operate within this particular social, political, and cultural context? How is Ma’s body understood in 1990s China, and how does he negotiate the parameters of gender and sexuality? How and why does Ma utilize and exploit the subversive configuration of gender in his work? What is ultimately at stake for him? This paper addresses the ways in which Ma explores the possibilities and limits of social constructs that are imposed on his body, in order to examine and disrupt the hegemonic notion of social categories, morality, and public conduct.