From conclusion: As la creme de la creme of dogdom the Pekingese dog allowed women to be the authors of an upper-class ideology that invoked a peculiarly sentimental and nostalgic discourse of colonial subjectivity.119 However, this was more than just a way of coping with loss---with the loss of upper-class financial and social power and the loss of Old Imperial China. The potential for material objects to be analogues to living memory as well as instruments in the formation of self implies a private and embodied experience, and one that involves multivalence and intimacy as well as official meanings and memories enshrined through social institutions.120 Both Bongie's exploration of colonial modernity articulated through a discourse of nostalgia and Hevia's study of colonial subjectivity constituted through Chinese loot invoke a series of masculine Western subject positions. The rise of the Pekingese dog in Britain reveals an emphatically feminine story of colonial appropriation in which women took control of China and assumed a powerful position in the definition of China. The marginalization of male participation in this context makes masculine agency hard to discern, an apparently simple inversion of the patriarchal status quo, but if this is in part a corollary of the disassociation and dismissal of feminine cultures by men, then the interest that some men did show in the breed only underlines the importance of the peke as a desirable and powerful oriental object.
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