Suchergebnisse

"In Transgender in Imperial China, Matthew Sommer offers a close reading of a series of remarkable, well-documented court cases from the 18th and 19th century Qing dynasty legal archives that deal with sex and gender difference. The book explores practices in their specific historical context and avoids imposing trans-historical identities on people in the past, understanding, in the vein of Susan Stryker's work, that "transgender people" are those who "move away from" the gender assigned at birth and "cross over" the gender boundaries imposed by their society, without assuming any specific motivation or destination for that movement. Sommer details the experience of individuals assigned male at birth who were living as women (and were punished very harshly for the crime of "masquerading in women's attire"), but also includes under the sign "transgender" a range of personae not usually considered in this context, such as cross-dressing "boy actresses" of the opera and those who "left the family" by becoming Buddhist or Daoist clergy or eunuchs in imperial service and renouncing normative gender roles based on marriage and procreation. These cases explore a range of themes in Chinese law, society, and culture, and illuminate how many forms of gender transgression were sanctioned by law in Qing society. In considering all of these scenarios together, Sommer's book unpacks the full story of how sex and gender were understood in the Qing era"--

This study of the regulation of sexuality in the Qing dynasty explores the social context for sexual behavior criminalized by the state, arguing that the eighteenth century in China was a time of profound change in sexual matters. During this time, the basic organizing principle for state regulation of sexuality shifted away from status, under which members of different groups had long been held to distinct standards of familial and sexual morality. In its place, a new regime of gender mandated a uniform standard of sexual morality and criminal liability across status boundaries—all people were expected to conform to gender roles defined in terms of marriage. This shift in the regulation of sexuality, manifested in official treatment of charges of adultery, rape, sodomy, widow chastity, and prostitution, represented the imperial state's efforts to cope with disturbing social and demographic changes. Anachronistic status categories were discarded to accommodate a more fluid social structure, and the state initiated new efforts to enforce rigid gender roles and thus to shore up the peasant family against a swelling underclass of single, rogue males outside the family system. These men were demonized as sexual predators who threatened the chaste wives and daughters (and the young sons) of respectable households, and a flood of new legislation targeted them for suppression. In addition to presenting official and judicial actions regarding sexuality, the book tells the story of people excluded from accepted patterns of marriage and household who bonded with each other in unorthodox ways (combining sexual union with resource pooling and fictive kinship) to satisfy a range of human needs. This previously invisible dimension of Qing social practice is brought into sharp focus by the testimony, gleaned from local and central court archives, of such marginalized people as peasants, laborers, and beggars

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- CONVENTIONS IN THE TEXT -- MAP: Provinces of China Proper within the Qing Empire, circa 1800 -- Introduction -- 1. "Getting a Husband to Support a Husband" -- 2. Attitudes of Families, Communities, and Women toward Polyandry -- 3. The Intermediate Range of Practice -- 4. Anatomy of a Wife Sale -- 5. Analysis of the Prices in Wife Sales -- 6. Negotiations between Men over Wife Sales -- 7. Wives, Their Natal Families, and Children -- 8. Four Variations on a Theme -- 9. Formal Law and Central Court Interpretation from Ming through High Qing -- 10. Absolutism versus Pragmatism in Central Court Treatment of Wife Sales -- 11. Flexible Adjudication of Routine Cases in the Local Courts -- Conclusion -- APPENDICES -- CHARACTER LIST -- NOTES -- REFERENCES -- INDEX

This book traces the social history of early modern Japan's sex trade, from its beginnings in seventeenth-century cities to its apotheosis in the nineteenth-century countryside. Drawing on legal codes, diaries, town registers, petitions, and criminal records, it describes how the work of "selling women" transformed communities across the archipelago. By focusing on the social implications of prostitutes' economic behavior, this study offers a new understanding of how and why women who work in the sex trade are marginalized. It also demonstrates how the patriarchal order of the early modern state was undermined by the emergence of the market economy, which changed the places of women in their households and the realm at large