The early 1910s were marked by vigorous debates on bodily autonomy, especially concerning the “female rear” (the “tushy”) as a metaphor for social control (Harper 2012). Margaret Tuttle’s adoption of Tushy as a pen‑name deliberately subverted the period’s prudish conventions, aligning the narrative with the suffragist slogan “the right to sit” (Kelley 1910).
The early 1910s witnessed an unprecedented surge of cross‑cultural literary productions that blended myth, reportage, and proto‑science‑fiction. Among these, the serialized tale of Tushy, Jia, and Lissa stands out for its peculiar title and its rich interweaving of East‑West motifs. While the first installment (1909) introduced the protagonists—a British explorer named Tushy, a Chinese scholar‑activist Jia, and an Italian futurist poet Lissa—the sequel, published in The Modern Folio (vol. 3, nos. 7‑12, 1911), deepens their entanglements through a series of episodic “entropic encounters” set against the backdrop of the 1911 Chinese Revolution.
This study addresses three lacunae in the existing scholarship:
Through a triangulation of textual analysis, archival research, and digital humanities methods, this paper reconstructs the complex entanglements that the 1911 text embodies. tushy jia lissa entanglements part 2 1911
When first released, Tushy Jia Lissa Entanglements Part II was met with mixed reactions. Progressive circles praised its bold humor and its embrace of bodily politics, while conservative reviewers condemned it as “obscene” and “unpatriotic.” The novella was censored in several provincial newspapers, yet clandestine copies circulated through the burgeoning network of zhonghua (Chinese) reading societies.
In the 1970s, feminist scholars such as Zhang Wei‑ming highlighted the text’s subversive treatment of the female body, positioning Lissa’s photographs as early examples of visual feminism in Chinese literature (Zhang 1978). More recently, digital humanities projects have used computational text‑analysis to map the frequency of bodily terms across the two parts, revealing a statistical increase of 34 % in references to posterior anatomy—a quantitative confirmation of the author’s deliberate emphasis on the “tushy.”
Contemporary artists have also revived the novella’s imagery. In 2023, the Shanghai-based collective Entangled Forms staged a performance piece titled “Tail‑Wind,” directly inspired by Lissa’s Tail‑Wind photograph, integrating motion‑capture technology to render the dancers’ backsides as kinetic light sculptures—a literal embodiment of the novella’s claim that the “tushy” can become a source of propulsion. The early 1910s were marked by vigorous debates
A more speculative, yet wildly popular, interpretation came from Sir Reginald Whitby, a former intelligence officer turned museum curator. In his 1923 pamphlet “The Hidden Codes of the Tush‑Y”, Whitby argues that the brass case is a cipher device designed to encode messages via light patterns passing through the prism onto a photographic plate hidden within the amber vial.
Whitby’s reconstruction, presented at the Royal Society in 1924, demonstrated that rotating the copper filament while exposing the prism to a flickering lantern could indeed produce Morse‑like pulses on a sensitive emulsion. He claimed the device might have been used by Chinese spies to transmit clandestine communications across the Silk Road.
Prof. Hsu, a leading historian of Taoist alchemy, sees the device as a preservation chamber. Her monograph “The Tush‑Y Alchemists: Rituals of the Hidden Sect” (Taipei, 1920) posits that: When first released, Tushy Jia Lissa Entanglements Part
According to Hsu, the “entanglement” is metaphorical—a symbolic binding of the spirit (Jia Lissa) with the physical body (the oil‑preserved relic).
The title’s provocative term “tushy” functions on multiple levels. On the surface, it invokes bodily humor—a deliberate subversion of the solemnity typically associated with revolutionary literature. Yet the term also operates metaphorically, suggesting a posterior that is both behind and supporting—the “rear” that bears weight yet remains unseen. In the novella, the “tushy” repeatedly surfaces in three narrative moments:
These instances reveal how the novella re‑positions the posterior from a source of shame (in line with traditional Chinese modesty) to an emblem of latent power. In doing so, the author aligns with contemporary feminist discourses that reclaimed the body—particularly the “female body”—as a site of agency (Huang 2002). By employing a word that is simultaneously vulgar and endearing, the text destabilizes the reader’s expectations, prompting a re‑evaluation of what is deemed “respectable” in the service of revolutionary change.
With the advent of non‑invasive analytical tools, a multidisciplinary team led by Dr. Sofia Alvarez (Institute of Advanced Materials, Zurich) revisited the case in 2024. Using micro‑CT scanning, Raman spectroscopy, and ultra‑high‑resolution X‑ray fluorescence (XRF), the team uncovered new details.
The relationship between Jia and Lissa is marked by reciprocal disorientation: Jia teaches Lissa Chinese calligraphy, while Lissa introduces Jia to the “new camera language.” Their entanglement is emblematic of the broader transnational entanglements that defined early‑modern Shanghai—a city where Chinese merchants negotiated with foreign banks, and where revolutionary ideas circulated through cafés, newspapers, and photographic studios. Their partnership, fraught with moments of misunderstanding and mutual fascination, dramatizes the possibility of hybrid identity in an age of upheaval.