ELISABETH LUND ENGEBRETSEN
Department of Anthropology
London School of Economics
HOMEPAGE

BIO

Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen (B.A. University of Oslo, M.Sc. London School of Economics) is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the London School of Economics; she expects to receive her doctorate in spring 2008. Her dissertation, entitled Love in a Big City: An Anthropological Study of Sexuality, Kinship and Citizenship amongst Lesbian Women in Beijing, is based on twenty months of fieldwork in Beijing.

TITLE

“An anthropological account of emerging same-sex subjectivity and sociality among women in late-socialist urban China (Beijing)”

ABSTRACT

The paper is based on my doctoral fieldwork in Beijing spanning twenty months between 2004 and 2006. I examine the life worlds of a diverse population of women in Beijing who were affiliated with semi-public and private networks, events and identity categories labeled 'lesbian' (lala) or similar. I specifically address emerging subjective and collective identity categories among lala women and demonstrate their interrelationship with changing meanings of gender, kinship and belonging in post-Mao China. I suggest that recent decades' rapid socio-economic development, state relaxation of social control and corresponding increased personal freedom, have effected new gendered and socio-spatial possibilities to aspire towards life trajectories and achieve a sense of belonging and recognition that are in many ways substantially different from 'traditional' norms based on filial kinship and collective belonging based on socialist and nationalist politics and cultural cosmology. I demonstrate the complex and changing interrelationship between straightforwardly normative concerns of family, marriage, and motherhood, and the newly emergent possibilities for thinking and living alternative lives that importantly include same-sex intimate relationships but in fact rarely did break radically with normative expectations.

MARAM EPSTEIN and LIU WENJIA 刘雯佳
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
University of Oregon
HOMEPAGE

BIO

Maram Epstein (B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. Princeton University) is Associate Professor of Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon. Her many publications on Ming, Qing, and Republican-era fiction include Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late-Imperial Chinese Fiction (Harvard University Press, 2001), which has also appeared in Chinese translation.

Liu Wenjia is a graduate student in University of Oregon. She is interested in Ming-Qing fiction, and especially the issues and aesthetics and the gender and sexuality in them.

TITLE

“Homosociality and Homosexuality in the late-Qing tanci Feng shuang fei”

ABSTRACT

The late-Qing tanci “A Pair of Male Phoenixes Flying Together” (Feng shuang fei 鳳雙飛; preface dated 1899) is unusual for its depiction of a wide variety of sexual relationships, including male same-sex eroticism. Since the 52-chapter work is credibly attributed to the female poet Cheng Huiying, who is known to have written the poetry collection Beichuang yin’gao, the tanci gives scholars a unique opportunity to see how a gentry woman thought of same-sex male eroticism and intimate female friendships.

Unlike male-authored works, which typically use the figure of the domineering shrew to depict a world gone topsy-turvy, Feng shuang fei features the “incomparable” Bai Ruyu “White as Jade,” a boy so irresistible that all men who see him—including an imperial prince--want to bed him, as the sign of yinyang imbalance. Bai Ruyu eventually becomes a positive force when he uses his sex appeal to make the invading barbarian leaders attack each other out of jealousy. Bai Ruyu’s decision to castrate himself, thereby removing himself from circulation as a male object of desire, initiates the cycle of yang ascendance and the reinstatement of proper political and domestic order. Although women’s relationships are not explicitly sexualized, Feng shuang fei makes use of the motif common to other female-authored tanci of female crossdressing and marriage. In contrast to the negative treatment of male eroticism, the bonds between the beautiful women protagonists are aestheticized and domesticated when the female protagonists arrange for their beautiful “sisters” to marry their husbands as concubines so that the women can be together forever.

Our paper will read the treatment of gender and sexuality in Feng shuang fei against the context xiaoshuo narrative fiction to see how Cheng Huiying borrowed and transformed the sexual politics and aesthetics of late-imperial male-authored fiction.

ANDREA S. GOLDMAN
Department of History
University of California, Los Angeles
HOMEPAGE

BIO

Andrea S. Goldman (B.A. Wesleyan University, Ph.D. UC Berkeley) is Assistant Professor of modern Chinese history at UCLA; she previously taught at the University of Maryland for several years. She is now revising her dissertation, entitled “Opera in the City: Theatrical Performance and Urbanite Aesthetics in Beijing, 1770-1900,” for publication. She has also trained and performed professionally as a Chinese comic dialogue actor in both Taiwan and the PRC.

TITLE

“Boy Heroines, Manchu Villains, and the Curious Gaze of a Frenchman in Peking in the Twilight of the Empire”

ABSTRACT

This paper reads the homoeroticism of Chen Sen's mid-nineteenth century novel, Pinhua baojian (Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses) against the adaptation of the same text by the French interpreter-cum-diplomat George Soulié de Morant (1878-1955), which came to be titled Bijou-de-Ceinture: Acteur-Actrice or Pei Yu: Boy Actress.

Soulié de Morant traveled to China in 1901, where he first worked as a translator for the Chinese Railway Association, and later as the interpreter for the French Consul in Shanghai. He served in the Mixed Court in Shanghai, and he was also stationed in Hankow and Yunnan, all prior to the 1911 Revolution. He returned to France after the revolution, and then spent one additional year in China sometime during World War I. By 1918, he was again back in France, where he remained for the rest of his life, but as his publishing record shows, he retained a passion for China and all things Chinese. Between 1903 and 1934, he penned over twenty works on China or translated from Chinese. A sample list of titles indicates his eclectic interests, from his first Elements of Mongolian Grammar (1903) to an anthology of Song poetry (1923), a treatise on extraterritoriality and foreign interests in China (1925), biographies of Confucius (1929) and Sun Yatsen (1931), and an introduction to acupuncture (1934). Soulié de Morant additionally published at least seven romance-adventure novels set in China, the most eye-catching title being one that translates from the French as: What You Would Never Admit to Yourself, Even in Shanghai, City of Pleasures (1927). The author characterizes Pei Yu as embellished eyewitness reportage rather than as adaptation from a Chinese novel. Indeed, in spite of the obvious traces of Pinhua baojian in Pei Yu, never once does Soulié de Morant so much as hint at it as inspiration for his own creative work.

Pinhua baojian is set in the opera demimonde of early nineteenth-century Beijing. In structure and theme the novel explicitly acknowledges its debt to the great eighteenth-century masterpiece of vernacular fiction, Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber), while at the same time recasting the twelve love-lorn female protagonists of Dream as cross-dressing boy actors. For all its romanticization of the cream of opera stardom, the novel provides an important window onto the male-male sex trade in the Qing metropolis. Pinhua baojian also presents a hierarchized typology of sexualities, with the most rarefied kind tagged as male homoerotic (but chaste) desire.

When these novels are read side by side, two differences become immediately apparent: 1) Soulié de Morant did not capture the full range of erotics in the original; he turns the refined relationships between boy actors and their official male patrons into an Orientalist sexual u/dystopia; 2) new discourses of race – in which Manchus are vilified and in which the East is both vanquished and saved by the West – is introduced into Soulié de Morant's adaptation. Juxtaposition of these two texts reveals the limitations of western categories of sexual identity to define same-sex eroticism in Qing China; it also show the ways in which gender categories and early twentieth-century western notions of sexual perversion helped to inform anti-Manchu rhetoric at the end of the dynasty. Finally, its Orientalist filter notwithstanding, the French derivative novel is in some ways more faithful than the source text in documenting the practices of the late Qing opera demimonde; it further points to real historical explanations for the imposition of a new, “modern” sexual order in response to foreign aggression at the end of the empire.

JIE GUO 郭劼
Program in Comparative Literature
University of South Carolina
HOMEPAGE

BIO

Jie Guo 郭劼 (B.A. West China University of Medical Sciences, M.A. Peking University, Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University) is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of South Carolina. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled “Confusing Desires: Representations of Male Same-Sex Relationships in Late Ming and Early Qing Literature.” Her Chinese translation of Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender is forthcoming from Sanlian Press in Shanghai.

TITLE

“Naming the Unnamable: History, Male Same-Sex Desires, the Problematic of Naming”

ABSTRACT

This essay studies the confusing and often confused ways in which words are used to label male same-sex relationships and identities in the late Ming and early Qing period. Rather than treating male same-sex desires and relationships in late imperial China as something unified and easily identifiable, I contend that during this period, there was no umbrella term that was capable of at once labeling a wide range of same-sex erotic practices or desires. Rather, efforts to name and categorize these practices and desires were sometimes contradictory, which often resulted in powerfully transformative ambiguities about same-sex identities. Furthermore, not all same-sex erotic acts and identities are named or namable.

This, however, does not mean that individuals lack effective means to communicate about matters related to male love; indeed, vague as they are, words such as the indicative pronoun “this” (zhe這) have played an important role in quotidian situations where no handy terms are there for people to use. I hold that our chance – no matter how slim it may be – to grasp the meaning of same-sex erotic signs depends on our understanding of their use in everyday situations. By looking at the “muddled” ways in which words are invented and/or (mis)used to label same-sex erotic acts and identities in late Ming and early Qing fiction, I argue: first, different individuals use these terms differently, which leads to an endless proliferation of the often conflicting meanings of these words; second, despite the constant presence of the attempts to label same-sex practices and engaged persons, not all of them are named and/or namable – importantly, some remain necessarily unnamed/unnamable. This “unnamedness/ unnamability,” while sometimes making same-sex relationships hard to identify, grants individuals space to negotiate illicit desires.

JIANG JIN 姜进
Department of History
East China Normal University
HOMEPAGE

BIO

JIANG Jin 姜进 (B.A. and M.A. East China Normal University, Ph.D. Stanford University) is Professor of Chinese history at East China Normal University in Shanghai; she previously taught at Shenzhen University and Vassar College. She has published widely in both English and Chinese on culture and politics in modern China. Her latest book, Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in 20th-Century Shanghai, is forthcoming from University of Washington Press.

TITLE

“Women’s Opera and Female Same-Sex Relations in Republican Shanghai”

ABSTRACT

Women’s Yue opera was a popular theatrical form in which all roles were played by actresses for a largely female audience. The opera first started as an all-girls’ theater in the countryside of Shengxian, Zhejiang, in the early 1920s. It became extremely popular in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s, and its influences spread throughout the Mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of half a century, a traditional form was reshaped by modern conditions to become an important part of an emerging urban mass culture. One of the most important factors in this development was women’s entrance into the cultural market. While women were avid readers of butterfly literature and authors of love stories, their entrance into the opera market, as actresses and spectators, was central to the transformation of the male-dominated opera culture of the Qing Dynasty to a female-centered one in the twentieth century, of which women’s Yue opera was perhaps the most important manifestation.

Although we have pretty good knowledge about the homoerotic and homosocial world of Beijing opera of the late Qing, we know very little about the same-sex culture of women’s Yue opera that flourished in Republican Shanghai. This paper investigates the homosexual aspects in women’s Yue opera against the background of the general Republican reformation of sex and gender relations. By juxtaposing the opera’s stage representations of heterosexual love by the same-sex cast with the off-stage homoerotic and homosocial relationships within women's opera circles, this paper explores a spectrum of possibilities for women in Republican-era Shanghai.

WENQING KANG 康文庆
Department of History
Cleveland State University
HOMEPAGE

BIO

Wenqing Kang 康文庆 (B.A. Institute of International Relations, Beijing; M.A. University of Denver; M.A. New York University; Ph.D. UC Santa Cruz) is Assistant Professor of Chinese history at Cleveland State University. He is currently revising his dissertation, “Male Same-Sex Relations in Twentieth-Century China: 1900-1950,” for publication as a book. His article “Male Same-Sex Relations in Modern China: Language, Media Representation and Law” is forthcoming in positions: east asia cultures critique.

TITLE

“Dan (Male Actors Playing Female Roles) and Sexuality in Chinese National Modernity”

ABSTRACT

On April 20, 1912, the Central Police Office of the Beijing Outer City published an announcement that banned the practice in the opera field of using adolescent male actors-in-training for possible sexual service of elite men. This announcement marked a clear shift in the meaning of male same-sex relations between literati and Peking Opera actors. Before this shift, men who patronized male actors were considered to have a refined taste that symbolized high-class status. After the shift, the practice was regarded as a decadent fad and deemed vulgar, inhuman, and unacceptable for the new republic.

The announcement also revealed a clear connection between the changing meaning of male same-sex relations and the semi-colonial situation of the nation. As it said, the practice of literati-actor sexual relations had to be stopped not only because it threatened to contaminate the body politic of the nation, but also because it invited the contempt of foreigners. For the author of the edict, to eradicate this filthy habit of sexual relations between literati and male actors was of vital significance for building an image of a strong China in the international arena. However, the meaning of male same-sex relations between literati and Peking Opera actors did not change simply by means of the 1912 government proclamation. It involved a long process of discursive production, which I argue involved two processes: the desexualization of the actor/patron relationship, and heterosexualization of the dan actor. In this paper, I use a series of historical cases to illustrate these processes.

PETRUS LIU
Department of Comparative Literature
Cornell University
HOMEPAGE

BIO

Petrus Liu (B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. UC Berkeley) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He now has two book manuscripts in progress: Stateless Subjects: A Political History of the Chinese Martial Arts Novel, 1911-1978 and Queer Taiwan. He has also co-edited (with Lisa Rofel) a forthcoming special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique entitled Beyond the Strai(gh)ts, which presents papers from the eponymous conference that he helped organize at UC Berkeley while a graduate student.

TITLE

“Paper Marriage and Transnational Queer Politics”

ABSTRACT

The 1986 publication of Chen Ruoxi’s Paper Marriage three years after Pai Hsienyung’s Crystal Boys was a short-lived but sensational queer event in Taiwan. Better known today through its cinematic reincarnation as Ang Lee’s 1993 Wedding Banquet, Chen’s original story adumbrated the beginnings of a new form of “transnational queer politics”: a mode of imagining one’s differences from normative conceptions of gender and sexuality as having a transformative effect on the hierarchical arrangement of nations. Significantly, Chen, one of the first and most influential queer novelists writing in Chinese, is also one of Taiwan’s foremost anti-Communist writers, internationally well-known for her experiences as an ardent Maoist during the Cultural Revolution. My talk will analyze the ways in which Chen’s queer novel, which presents itself as a happy transnational marriage between a mainland Chinese woman and an American gay man, derives its notion of the “closet” from an earlier transnational encounter between Taiwan and Mainland China. Chen’s literary project is then an exemplary instance of how the category of the queer can be mobilized, in historical terms, to rethink the complex order of transnational politics and narratives of birth-rights during the Cold War in Asia.

FRAN MARTIN
School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
HOMEPAGE

BIO

Fran Martin (B.A. and Ph.D. University of Melbourne) lectures in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne in Australia. She is author of Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong U.P., 2003); co-editor, with Peter Jackson, Mark McLelland and Audrey Yue, of AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities (Illinois U.P., forthcoming 2008) and co-editor with Larissa Heinrich of Embodied Modernities: Corporeality, Representation and Chinese Cultures (U. of Hawaii P., 2006). She also edited and translated Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan (U. of Hawaii P., 2003).

TITLE

“Love and Remembrance: Women’s same-sex desire in trans-national Chinese media and popular cultures”

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the findings of a recently concluded three-year research project, this paper is about the epistemology of female homoeroticism in contemporary Chinese media and popular cultures, including film, television and fiction. It asks: What are the most common narrative, generic, and ideological patterns in representations of love between women in contemporary Chinese popular cultures? Are there recurring themes and structures of feeling in these mass cultural figurations of women’s same-sex relations?

In response to these questions, the paper proposes the centrality of a temporal logic in contemporary Chinese representations of women’s same-sex love. It argues that a dominant, modern Chinese discourse on female homoeroticism has asserted the impossibility of lesbian futures: sexual relations between women are culturally imaginable only in youth, therefore same-sex sexual relations may appear in adult femininity’s past, very rarely its present, and never its future. Following a brief survey of texts structured by this temporal epistemology across two historical waves (1920s-30s and 1970-present), the paper turns to a more detailed analysis of lesbian memorialism in 《刺青》 (Spider Lilies), the most recent film from Taiwanese filmmaker Zero Chou (周美玲). I frame Spider Lilies as part of a broader trend in recent queer filmmaking across the PRC China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, in which filmmakers take up the familiarly memorial cast of dominant representations of women’s same-sex love only to turn it inside out to assert the imminence of lesbian presents and futures.

KEITH MCMAHON
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Kansas
HOMEPAGE

BIO

R. Keith McMahon (B.A. Indiana University, M.A. Yale University, Ph.D. Princeton University) is Professor of Chinese literature and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-century Chinese Fiction (Brill, 1988), Misers, Shrews, and Polygamists (Duke University Press, 1995), and The Fall of the God of Money: Opium Smoking in Nineteenth-century China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

TITLE

"Same-sex desire and the ethics of equality in Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses"

ABSTRACT

The 1849 novel Precious Mirror of Boy Actresses (Pinhua baojian 品花寶鑑) inherits from late Ming and early Qing predecessors an aesthetic of love, called the qing 情 aesthetic, which harbors an implicit ethics of equality. The qing aesthetic defines itself against the ugly world of rapacious sexuality, where sex per se is seen as a vulgar and violently hierarchical act dominated by privileged men. The world of vulgar sexuality corresponds to the dominant regime of sexuality in Qing China, which is best defined by two words, polygamy and prostitution. The questions I will answer in this paper are: How does the novel inherit the qing aesthetic and how does the novel use the aesthetic to define a transcendent world of sublime same-sex love? How does the novel invert the expectations of the world of vulgar sexuality, that is, the regime of polygamy and prostitution?

Precious Mirror portrays a scene of sublime love between young scholars and boy female impersonators, called dan or xiaodan 小旦, whose affair represents a zone of absolute transcendence. A key feature of the relationship is that, because the boy is indentured to the opera troupe, if the young scholar truly loves and respects the boy, he must and does ultimately allow the boy to become a free man and marry a free woman. By enacting social liberation in this way, the author Chen Sen engages the egalitarian implications of the qing aesthetic. As inherited from the late Ming and early Qing, the true sign of qing love is when love partners both hypothetically and actually exchange with each other, that is, when they look alike and mingle both masculine and feminine, subjective and objective, and high and low. The more valuable direction of exchange is becoming feminine, which is more conducive to realizing the subjectivity of the other person than being masculine. Thus the true knower of the xiaodan understands him from the inside. To be the boy’s lover means to act upon an ethical obligation to help him “leave the profession,” gai hang 改行, that is, redeem himself from his indenture to the opera troupe and allow him to become a peer of the young scholar himself.

The novel must also be placed in the broader context of the regime of polygamy and prostitution. The main example of the dominant man in Precious Mirror is Xi Shiyi, who as a representative of the ancient tradition of polygamy and prostitution is born with the privilege of having multiple sexual partners, both inside and outside of marriage, whom he expects to accept their inferior and in some cases base status, and compliantly and unjealously serve his sexual needs. The boy actor is the prime example of the base subject who vividly expresses his entrapment in the position of instrument of the rapacious man’s lust and who ultimately gains his liberation based on the logic of the qing aesthetic’s radical ethics of equality. Precious Mirror is remarkable among other Qing novels for its explicit portrayal of the subjectivity of the entrapped base lover.

PIERRE MIEGE
Institute of Social Development and Social Policy
Beijing Normal University
HOMEPAGE

BIO

Pierre Miège (M.A. School of Oriental and African Studies; Ph.D. Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) is Associate Professor in the Institute of Social Development and Public Policy at Beijing Normal University. His doctoral dissertation is entitled “Economic Reforms and the Transformation of the Work Unit System: Assessing Social Change in Urban China (1978-2004).” His recent field research in China has focused on urban social networks of MSM, sexual negotiation and STD/AIDS prevention among young urban couples, and sexual health among migrant women.

TITLE

“The constitution of social networks among young MSM in urban China: HIV/AIDS prevention programs and the local translation of the ‘Gay community’”

ABSTRACT

Chinese MSM are the object of growing attention, but they remain a largely unknown and misunderstood population. The objective of this research is to contribute to the understanding of the way social networks, especially networks that enable mutual support, are being formed between young MSM in China. The nature of these networks is changing as a growing number of young MSM, including some living in small cities, do not necessarily “come out” to their family and to the community, but try to live a discreet yet “homosexual” life. In a context of social discrimination and lack of support, it is important for young MSM to know they can count on the support from other young persons going through the same experiences.

Some preliminary observations made in Hefei, Anhui, revealed the crucial influence of HIV/AIDS prevention programs on both the constitution of networks of MSM, and the increase of the identification with a “tongzhi community”. Such prevention programs, prepared in collaboration with foreign institutions, are designed to rely on a “community of MSM” inspired by Western “gay communities”, and insist on “peer education” to spread the adoption of safer sex behaviour.

This research focuses on two phenomena: first, it studies the way implementation of HIV/AIDS prevention programs contributes to transmit some concepts and ideas about “being gay” and “belonging to a gay community”; second, and most important, it observes and analyses the way these programs do not rely on social relationships and networks of young MSM but directly foster the constitution of such networks and relationships.

LISA ROFEL
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Santa Cruz
HOMEPAGE

BIO

Lisa Rofel (B.A. Brown University, M.A. and Ph.D. Stanford University) is Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her studies of gender, sexuality, and labor in post-socialist China include Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (University of California Press, 1999) and Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2007).

TITLE

"The Traffic in Money Boys"

ABSTRACT

Why do so many gay men in China speak anxiously about what they call, using the English term, "money boys"? "Money boys" is a colloquialism in China for men who sell sex to other men. What is it about money boys' activities that lead (other) Chinese gay men to go out of their way to point them out, condemn them, and even deny that those who wish to identify as gay deserve to be called "gay"? In this essay, I argue that money boys are a pressing issue for gay men in China because homophobia and dilemmas about the proper ways to challenge it are framed by the tremendous transformations that have occurred in China over the last twenty-five years that prominent scholars in China have begun to call "neo-liberalism."

TZE-LAN DEBORAH SANG
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
University of Oregon
HOMEPAGE

BIO

Tze-lan Deborah Sang 桑梓蘭 (B.A. National Taiwan University, M.A. SUNY Albany, Ph.D. UC Berkeley) is Associate Professor of Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon. She previously taught at Stanford University. Her studies of gender and sexuality in modern Chinese/ Taiwanese literature include The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

TITLE

“Queer Hermeneutics: Wu Jiwen's Fin-de-siècle Boy Love Reader”

ABSTRACT

Taiwanese writer Wu Jiwen is one of a few contemporary Chinese-language writers who have revisited premodern Chinese literature on same-sex union and desire and tried to appropriate it for present-day purposes. In Fin-de-siècle Boy Love Reader (1996), Wu's rewriting of Chen Sen's mid-nineteenth-century novel A Precious Mirror for Appraising Flowers, he chooses to narrate the story from the perspective of a teenage boy, who, in Chen's original text, occupies a subordinate, marginal position and is largely silent. I argue that Wu's decision to abandon the third-person omniscient perspective common in premodern Chinese novels to refocus on and imaginatively reconstruct the voice and subjectivity of an underling bespeaks a contemporary need to see the possibility of voluntary, egalitarian same-sex unions in some premodern sexual relationships notoriously shot through with class inequalities and age and gender hierarchies. Is Wu's project so overdetermined by late-twentieth-century political concerns as to lose interest as a historical and hermeneutic effort? Or has it surprisingly brought to light a much neglected dimension of traditional Chinese man-boy love? This paper will carefully read Boy Love Reader against its master text, while also keeping in mind the recurring themes that have appeared in Wu's overall oeuvre.

MATTHEW SOMMER
Department of History
Stanford University
HOMEPAGE

BIO

Matthew H. Sommer (B.A. Swarthmore College, M.A. University of Washington, Ph.D. UCLA) is Associate Professor of Chinese history at Stanford University; he previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania for seven years. His publications include Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford University Press, 2000) and “Making Sex Work: Polyandry as a Survival Strategy in Qing Dynasty China” (in Goodman and Larson, eds., Gender in Motion, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).

TITLE

“How to Understand the Male Same-Sex Relations Recorded in Qing Legal Cases”

ABSTRACT

Based on a sample of nearly 2000 Qing dynasty sodomy cases, I analyze long-term sexual relationships between males in two different milieus where they were common: in male subcultures outside the normative family system, and in settled peasant communities. In the male subcultures, many relationships were framed by chosen kinship (ganqin adoption or sworn brotherhood, but nothing resembling marriage). In both milieus, sexual relations were stratified by age; and by a certain age younger penetrated partners would “outgrow” these relationships, implying a definite limit to their duration. Even so, I have many examples of relationships lasting a decade or more. Within the settled peasant community, significant stigma attached to the penetrated sexual role, and younger partners tried to keep these relationships secret; nevertheless, a high degree of tacit tolerance (not to say approval) seems to have prevailed, based on the assumption that young males would eventually outgrow such relationships (upon marriage, at latest). In contrast, an unmarried daughter’s fornication seems to have provoked much stronger opprobrium.

While the hierarchical paradigm was clearly hegemonic, I do find some evidence for more egalitarian relationships based on reciprocity, in which partners eschewed stereotyped hierarchy by regularly exchanging sexual roles. It seems likely that such reciprocal relationships are underrepresented in legal cases because they would have been less prone to exploitation, conflict, and violence (inevitably, the latter are overrepresented in legal records). In general, the relationships found in my cases seem to have been far more self-determined and egalitarian than “biological” kinship relations (including marriage) or homoerotic relations between elites and males of lower status; in this sense, male same-sex relationships among peasants and marginalized males posed a radical contrast with normative order.

GIOVANNI VITIELLO
East Asian Languages and Literatures
University of Hawai’i
HOMEPAGE

BIO

Giovanni Vitiello (Laurea University of Rome "La Sapienza,” M.A. and Ph.D. UC Berkeley) is Associate Professor of Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. He has published widely on sexuality in Ming-Qing fiction and is now completing a book entitled The Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Chinese Fiction, 1550–1850. A second long-range book project is entitled The Birth of Chinese Pornography.

TITLE

"Libertine Masculinity: Homosociality and Homosexuality in Late Imperial Pornographic Fiction"

ABSTRACT

I will focus on the figure of the male libertine in pornographic fiction to argue that the boundaries of his sexuality and masculinity were drawn and redrawn, and in the process significantly altered, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. In late Ming erotic narratives we encounter a libertine whose masculinity is centrally realized through sexual penetration (of women and boys alike), and at once predicated upon his own impenetrability. But in a number of early Qing novels that same character can be sexually penetrated without his masculinity being compromised. Later still, in the first half of the eighteenth century, yet a new tendency is detectable, namely a gradual adumbration of the libertine’s homoeroticism. These developments, while pointing at a shift in the discourses on masculinity and male-male sexuality in fiction, might also signal an attempt to meet the new moral and legal standards of the mid-Qing period.

CUNCUN WU
School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
University of New England
HOMEPAGE

BIO

Cuncun Wu 吴存存is a senior lecturer in Chinese in the School of Arts at the University of New England, Australia. She was previously an associate professor in the Chinese Department of Nankai University, Tianjin, where she taught for more than 10 years. She moved to Australia as an exchange scholar, later completing her Ph.D. at the University of Melbourne (awarded 2002). She has published widely on gender and sexuality in China; her latest book is Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China (RoutlegeCurzon, 2004).

TITLE

“Flower-guides, public space and writing in nineteenth-century Beijing”

ABSTRACT

While composition of poetry dedicated to young male performers was practiced continually from the late Ming period through to the end of the Qing dynasty, there are several periods when this practice became enormously fashionable. At the same time, when we compare the late-Ming and early-Qing fashion with that of the late Qing we find there are significant differences. In the earlier practice the young performers were owned by scholar officials and were part of their garden estates. Most of the homoerotic poetry that was written in this period is linked to private garden parties. In the late Qing period the rapid development of public culture in Beijing meant that men were no longer admiring or displaying young performers in the privacy of their own estates, but were joining other men in a range of public spaces where they shared an infatuation with actors from opera troupes. While poetry continued to be an important vehicle for the appreciation of actors, the development of huapu (flower-guides) as a form of belles-letters gave rise to a new composite form of writing that was stretched between the genres of prose, poetry and drama. In this paper I will be using the huapu Fengcheng pinhuaji (Notes on flower appreciation from the Phoenix city) to begin to address the question, “What kind of act/s was huapu writing?”