ABSTRACT
Touch, as a private and fleeting sensuous moment, plays a key role in bodily experiences of love and sexuality. Kissing, reconfigured as a quintessential symbol of romantic love, assumed a new significance and intensity in modern Chinese culture under a range of cultural influences, translations, and mediations. Examining the selected examples of kissing scenes in pictorial magazines and film spectatorship, as well as the abundant kisses in vernacular love poetry, this chapter argues that the conceptualization and practice of kissing and romantic sensuality have significantly reschematized the bodily character of expression, cultural habits, and modern selfhood. Exploring these infrequently examined embodied experiences in an era of momentous cultural transformations during the first half of the twentieth century, this chapter sheds light on critical issues concerning the intertwined relationships between tactility and visuality, mimesis and modern notions of romantic intimacy, as well as chiasmic exchanges between the body, the other, and the world.
