Making National Heroes: The Exemplarist Production of Masculinities in Contemporary China

Making National Heroes is an ethnography on the making of national heroes in the commemoration of the Second World War in contemporary China. Foregrounding the lived experience of men and women who participate in commemorative activities, it theorises how masculinity and nationalism entangle in recollecting war memories. Taking the line of feminist inquiry, this anthropological study develops an approach to capture the centrality of making exemplars in the realisation of hegemonic masculinities. It adds a gender perspective to studies on the exemplarist moral theory and theorises exemplary men’s cross-culture significance in defining masculinities. Researchers in the fields of critical masculinity studies, anthropology, feminist methodology, China studies, and war memories may be interested in this book.

Jacqueline Zhenru Lin is assistant research professor in the Centre of China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.