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This essay solders together a historical case study of advertising on the China mainland in the early twentieth century with a series of generalizable appraisals and determinations to establish how the catachresis woman is evental. The event of women emerged historically in part because commercial advertising alleges that it did, and in part because at roughly the same time a subjective claim—"I am a woman"—began to be voiced. Although registered orthographically, woman 女性 is not simply a rhetorical category or a natural fact; it is not the effect of abyssal sex difference or an array of performatively accreted social subjects. It is a historical novelty. This essay universalizes a case rooted in Chinese- and Japanese-language archives and historical specificities, particularly the international advertising ephemera that presents a multiple (Badiou's language for a set or "context") or site where a historical event could have erupted and, in this case, did erupt. Ephemera are useful in historical analysis, as Walter Benjamin suggested a century ago, because historical events lie immanent in detritus as potential dialectical images, which the determined historian can extricate. Reading Badiou's philosophy creatively, the essay makes the case that women or woman is an emergent, historical, modern, and universal truth; direct critique of Badiou also drives home the point that philosophy (or "theory") is vulnerable to history and that historically, factually, actually, and in truth, women and feminism are foundations of modernity no matter how modernity is qualified.

Mashing Maps

The article seeks to supplant the idea of the "border" with that of "historical catachresis." The metaphor of the border intimates that space is a given, and that our job as historians is to step beyond prior marked places and reveal the existence of previously undisclosed or better ones. This concept of the border, proposed and discussed at the Berkshire Conference under the title "Sin Fronteras: Women's Histories, Global Conversations" in June 2005, places conceptual limits on thinking. This is most obvious in the case of ambiguous historical entities like colonialism, gender, or specific sign-systems. The concept of the historical catachresis, on the other hand, opens ways to read everyday evidence for experiences of incremental economic change, or commercial revolution, or new categories of sexuality, to name a few. Using the optic of the historical catachresis, and reading anachronistic images like a beautiful Bu'nei'men fertilizer woman image or the Nakayama Taiyodo colonial cosmetics company "girl," historians can enter into a contemporaneous moment. The article finally clarifies why older work on Chinese semicolonialism has been primarily reactive. It suggests that reading banal, ephemeral evidence for the emergence of new singularities or radically unprecedented experiences has the capacity to recast our conventional historians' questions of context, subjectivity, experience, and representation.