Sex in Big-Character Posters from China's Cultural Revolution : Gendering the Class Enemy

As a defining component of the Cultural Revolution, the “dictatorship of the masses” did away with constraints that had previously kept the most private of the private parts of Chinese people’s lives out of the political arena. In the years 1966–1969, in particular, discursive strands that did not shy away from the topic of sex in politics and revolution proliferated. This paper comments on some recurring common themes of gender and the male “class enemy” (his positive heroic counterpart, as it were, remained a strangely asexual creature throughout) and of sexuality and the revolutionary or counter-revolutionary woman. Found in public and highly visible so-called big-character posters, the discourse that blended politics into sex ended up giving impetus to a movement that brought down many a corrupt politician, but at the cost of traumatizing countless innocent victims who never recovered from seeing their lives’ “darkest aspects exposed openly.”