Lisa Bresner (1971‐2007) is a novelist, translator, and sinologist, who has dedicated her entire life to literary creation around China and Asia. Ma tendre ennemie is her second novel, published in 1994 by Gallimard. The themes of Lisa Bresner’s work have to do with body and sensation. As for Ma tendre ennemie, this symbolic role returns to the hair – the support of sexual seduction, of power, of fertility, and more particularly of this novel, of artistic creation. This article aims to analyse, how the notion of hair in the novel goes hand in hand with the ambiguous political and social stake of the wearing of the queue during the first Sino‐Japanese war, the deconstruction of the castration, the aesthetic of cruelty, and the reinterpretation of Asian eroticism.

Lisa Bresner (1971‐2007) is a novelist, translator, and sinologist, who has dedicated her entire life to literary creation around China and Asia. Ma tendre ennemie is her second novel, published in 1994 by Gallimard. The themes of Lisa Bresner’s work have to do with body and sensation. As for Ma tendre ennemie, this symbolic role returns to the hair – the support of sexual seduction, of power, of fertility, and more particularly of this novel, of artistic creation. This article aims to analyse, how the notion of hair in the novel goes hand in hand with the ambiguous political and social stake of the wearing of the queue during the first Sino‐Japanese war, the deconstruction of the castration, the aesthetic of cruelty, and the reinterpretation of Asian eroticism.