“Ding’s reading of Jin Ping Mei is unique and extremely important. By reading this novel as a cumulative accretion of text and commentary and as a cultural icon, she shows how all of us who read it from an aesthetic perspective are implicated in covering up its disturbing and hatefully misogynist core. This is a true coup.”— Maram Epstein, University ... Read moreof Oregon “In this absorbing study of the multiple lives of a literary classic that is also a popular pornographic text, Naifei Ding steals across the border between cultural studies and feminist/queer literary criticism. Bringing a gendered social history of modern print culture in China into a ‘porous intimacy’ with both a critique of interpretive power and a feminist ‘counter-ethics’ of reading, Obscene Things is a scholarly work of exceptional creativity. Ding herself is a wonderful storyteller, and her critical narration of the fortunes of Jin Ping Mei will inspire anyone concerned with the how of studying historical modalities of gender, sexuality, status, and cultural power.”—Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University “Those who read Ding’s investigation will never look at critical interpretations of Chinese fiction with the same complacency again.”—Robert E. Hegel, author of Reading Illustrated Fiction in Late Imperial China Show Less