Actors and Practices of the Shengpingshu: Gender, materiality and power in the theater of China's late Qing dynasty

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stefan Kramer
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies ; Asian Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 563606575

The project is located at the interface of transcultural and comparative media studies, epistemological archival studies and Chinese theater studies. It focuses on the state institution of the “Shengpingshu” (升平署，1827-1924). It administered the court and popular theaters, organized theater performances in the palace, controlled the popular stages in Beijing, supervised the training and employment of actors and was responsible for the archiving of plays, props, protocols, etc. “Shengpingshu” shows a gender complexity of the theater that is usually not evident in the plays themselves. As an inner-court theater institution, “Shengpingshu” was managed exclusively by eunuchs and already included a female harem audience in its activities at a time when women were still largely excluded from the theater. It contained a large number of cross-dressing actors and eventually left behind an enormous amount of administrative archives. Their paper documents, consisting of fragmented administrative texts, have a certain affinity with the marginalized genders and the anonymous voices of “infamous men”. They enter alongside and into a dialog with the hegemonic theatrical history of male dramatists and actors. Through their encounters with institutions and discourses, they were able to unleash subversive forces that had previously gone largely unnoticed, mirroring the material practices of courtly theater and exposing its established power structures. The project thus aims to link media archaeology with gender and queer political issues and to connect these to a local and an extended global history of knowledge. This involves incorporating bureaucratic aspects into research into the media and theater scene in late imperial China. This means a significant expansion of the discourses of material media practices, many of which have already been investigated, to include non-binary and female activists. The focus is on the connection between gender identities and the socio-political situation of China in the 19th century. Furthermore, the role of bureaucratic institutions as mediating actors in the praxis of Chinese theater and media culture, which has so far been completely overlooked in research, will be examined. This analysis will situate their production of cultural texts and meanings alongside the literary and dramatic works that have been foregrounded thus far. In doing so, it aims to propose a further research field in Chinese cultural analysis as well as in global theater and gender studies. Finally, the Chinese perspective itself will be introduced into the history of archives and knowledge, which has so far been dominated by Euro-American discourses, and proposed for further debate.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants