Male Subjectivities: The Idealization of the Democratic Public Sphere: Crossroads (1937) and The Trouble Shooters (1988)

Abstract

This paper explores male subjectivities that encompass primordial democratic consciousness in both 1930s and 1980s China. Drawing on Jurgen Habermas’s conceptualization of the public sphere, this paper identifies an imagined modern public sphere against Chinese urban representations. In both Crossroads (1937) and The Trouble Shooters (1988), male protagonists adopt the role of torchbearer in the vibrant urban sphere, working toward a newly defined social justice. Asserting a new male subjectivity evolved with the imaginative public good, providing a training ground for Chinese democracy. All of the above mirror some prominent features of the public sphere, including the masculine aspect of Habermas’s idealisation of the concept, as pinpointed by Nancy Fraser (1992).