Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China (Routledge/Asian Studies Association of Australia

by Wu Cuncun

Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China is the richest exploration to date of late imperial Chinese literati interest in male love. Employing primary sources such as miscellanies, poetry, fiction and 'flower guides', Wu Cuncun argues that male homoeroticism played a central role in the cultural life of late imperial Chinese literati elites. Countering recent arguments that homosexuality was marginal and disparaged during this period, the book also seeks to trace the relationship of homoeroticism to status and power.
In addition to historical portraits and analysis, the book also advances the concept of 'sensibilities' as a method for interpreting the complex range of homoerotic texts produced in late imperial China.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, LGBT, Queer

252 pages, Hardcover

First published August 2, 2004

Reviews

[Li Ya 🪷 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trudno czytać współczesną queerową literaturę chińską bez zastanawiania się jakie podejście wobec tego typu relacji miały dynastyczne Chiny. Wcześniej czytałam sporo książek o relacjach homoerotycznych w Japonii okresu Edo i ciekawe jak podobnie wyglądały te relacje w Chinach. Niestety w porównaniu do literatury queerowej okresu Edo (choćby powieści Ihary Saikaku) niewiele chińskich dzieł zostało przetłumaczonych na angielski i raczej rzadko się o nich mówi. Natomiast książka skupia się na większości z nich, a przynajmniej daje pewnie wprowadzenie wobec tego, o czym pisali poeci i pisarze okresu dynastii Ming i Qing.

[Karsten Vandenrijt · Rating 5 out of 5]

In de studie naar alle facetten van homoseksualiteit in de Chinese maatschappij zijn nog veel gaten, maar met dit relatief compact en gevat boek overbrugt Wu Cuncun alvast een grote en belangrijke periode die aan de basis ligt van ons begrip van soortgelijke thema's in de moderne periode. Aan de hand van literaire bronnen zoals romans, poëzie en proza onderzoekt Wu de manier waarop homoseksualiteit tot uiting kwam in de elitaire kringen van de late keizerlijke dynastieën. In detail beschrijft ze de verschillende trends en hoe die elkaar beïnvloedden en met elkaar interageerden. Dit in samenspel met de chronologische ontwikkelingen van de sociaal-maatschappelijke realiteit, van het libertijnse ideaal van de late Ming dynastie tot de genderuitdagende kwaliteiten in de Beijing opera uit de Qing dynastie. Noodgedwongen bleef de scope van de studie enkel binnen de culturele/politieke/economische elite, waar het leeuwendeel van de bronnen vandaan komt. Sociale hiërarchie, zoals blijkt uit haar bevindingen, is ook van groot belang voor het begrip van de interpersoonlijke dynamiek in het romantische speelveld. Al bij al een gouden standaard voor verdere studies naar homoseksualiteit in de Chinese maatschappij.

[Gordon Goodwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Knowledge is power only when put to use.

[Andre · Rating 2 out of 5]

The foreword states how this book's detailed historical research conjures up the refined and vivid sexual culture of Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), opera patrons and the actors they doted on and dated. It talks of de-westernization of queer studies and is so arrogant to ask whether it can "participate in the undoing of the arrogant certainties of modern culture in new ways, or will it point to the limits of that undoing." At least it admits that today these guys musing about teenage boys would have the cops on them.
I knew at the start of this book that it will barely feature erotic desire for adult men and the boys will be highly feminized to the point of crossdressing. And I was right. It lies, when it claims that "in late imperial literature devoted love between young men was as noble as love between young men and women." There is no clear "love between young men" in this book. At most it has adult men "loving" teenage boys.
She is playing down the bad stuff about imperial China while hypocritically complaining about western visitors to the Ming and how they recorded "their own prejudices in the matter". She herself states that in Qing writing it was sexual relationships between upper-class men and dan boy-actors (aka basically forced teenage male prostitutes). If the Ming, Qing and Song dynasties were so open in terms of sexuality, why were the only accepted "targets" women and teenage boys? In fact, in the only chapter where she adresses the dark underbelly of this world, she portrays something that is basically sex-trafficking.
She claimed that people who enjoyed homosexual relations existed in every class, from the male favourites of the imperial court to cases of homoerotic vogue among the labouring classes, and the literati were the most prominent and active class of supporters. Not only was homoerotic behaviour not condemned, feminized boys were considered fascinatingly romantic. To which I ask: And what about masculine boys/men and lesbian women?
Allegedly the vast majority of elite males who engaged in "male-love" were bisexual in their sexual appetite. I doubt that, not just because their "same-sex relationships were narrowly restricted in relation to social class and rules of status" but also because she herself talks of "particularly attractive young men, usually older than twelve and younger than twenty", which is barely more than children today. References to relationships between men of equal status are rare from the Qing period, and she has only 2 examples for it. That is really noticeable here. Among the literati, homoerotic relationships between social equals were regarded as anomalous and were commonly frowned upon. Records in Qing dynasty biji treat such affairs as the subject of bizarre stories where men follow a course of self-degradation, incurring losses in status that defy normal comprehension. Among the lower classes, references to such relationships occur most frequently in legal statutes. And yet the author never actually adresses this issue. It is mentioned in the introduction and then discarded.
If "cross-dressing was an ever-present feature of homoeroticism throughout Chinese history" and "in the Qing it became far more strongly identified with the passive role in male homosexual relationships." how homoerotic is this really? She dismissed the substitute for women thesis but she was not making a good case for her stance. According to her this "homoeroticism" during the Qing is not only connected to "dan" actors being a highly stylized and objectified appropriation of female beauty, but possibly connected to mysoginism of literati, or the result of a reassessment of the role of women in marriage and society. So why is the substitution theory wrong in her mind?
She claims that "the traditional biographies of emperor's male favourites were deliberately omitted by the compilers, in all likelihood as a reaction to Western cultural influence." But what cultural influence? That these earliest Western writings were critical of what she calls homosexual behavior in China doesn't mean much to me. Nor would I be so quick to interpret something as tolerance for gay male sex. According to her homosexual practices in China were shaped by an ideology that indulged male desire, was more than socially tolerated, common, widely accepted "in that it was regarded as an option for a male individual to satisfy his sexual desire". That is vague to make it sound better. And of course she comes with "the sexual encounter between two men, is never inmoral per se" nonsense. And just because what the author calls homosexuality never became the target of "sustained religious condemnation or medical circumspection", doesn't equate to acceptance.
She claimed that homosexuality was widely accepted and common, but also: "homosexuality was largely limited to the world of the Beijing literati." And when she writes that "Qing government edicts prohibited officials from indulging with boy entertainers but this did not imply an intolerance of homosexuality per se" I question her logic. If Ming/Qing prohibited officials associating with catamites, why are they tolerating homosexuality as she claims? If brothels became less visited by the upper classes because they preferred catamites, why was that so? And why has "female prostitution remained a flourishing industry in south-eastern cities such as Nanjing, Suzhou, Yangzhou and Hangzhou during the Qing dynasty" but not Beijing then?
The writing of this author is so deceiving that you easily get a wrong picture, like when she writes how widespread homoerotic pleasure was among Ming men of all classes, but the majority of what she presents is among the literati and only mentioned interest in highly effeminate teenage boys, not adult men. And it is really weird how she constantly writes "Young men and boys", when she not only gave a definition of "young men" as between 12-20 years, but also barely wrote any actual age. Not to mention, the sources constantly say boy and boy-actors etc., not "men." And her writing that in the Ming period "male homoeroticism was a sign of success and social standing" doesn't make it sound better. She even mentions the "gay marriage" in Fujian, but what she doesn't tell the reader is that the term "contract brother" should be taken literally. It was a contract and this "marriage" was not an alternative to a heterosexual one, nor does she say how long they usually lasted or that significant age difference was a requirement.
I think she plays things down when she says that "Longyang Yishi also aimed to portray the tragic fate of some boys who served as both personal servant and homosexual passive" and says that "Some were not initially attracted to homosexual behaviour". She says there are stories of homosexual relationships between friends and classmates, but gives no examples. Even the mentioned homosexual kingdom is not specific. According to her "sexual relationships between men were part of a distinct cultural and social phenomenon", except that she never presented such an example of men.
As she mentioned late Ming prohibitions against "xiaochang" (basically singing sexually passive boy prostitutes) and how ineffective they allegedly were, I have to ask: why are the prohibitions there at all if tolerance was so widespread? And how frequent where they used for sex anyway? And would be nice to know some of those examples of how catamites played an increasing role in local and national politics.
It took her some time to adress the inequality in those "homoerotic relationships". And I'd agree that terms like homo/bi might not be appropriate, but rather because it sounds nothing like it. And she writes how the most desired catamites were of an age when signs of their masculinity were still latent, the prime at age 14-15 sui. In stories, older catamites were usually the villains or miserly, their carreers much shorter than that of female prostitutes (who could at least produce male heirs). The majority in late Ming appear to have been discarded to poverty, humiliation and many stories describe them wandering as beggars, dying young under violent or mysterious circumstances or making a living in the lowest jobs. And she gets a bit more savy when she speaks how Li Yu says that "same sex love among males" was as common as heterosexuality, even though Li Yu still talks only about catamites apparently (a poem by Zhao Yi might be an erotic verse describing a man, but only maybe). And the fashion of boy actors (early she said it wasn't a fashion), was for the Qing literati a moral demonstration of continuing attachment and loyalty to the previous dynasty. This makes the whole thing look even less like true homosexuality or even eroticism.
And why does she never state how long such alleged "love" between an adult and a boy actor lasted (maybe two of her concrete examples lasted past the boy's puberty)? Maybe some of her examples had substance, but even those were rare here.
According to her male-male relationships were never as tightly regulated as male-female relationships, but her statement of "what men did with other men could mean only comparatively little in terms of the social morality" doesn't say much. That is a general problem here, she is in essence quite vague while seeming to be specific.
Her saying that certain poems celebrate love between men is misleading if not straight up lying, as they are usually vague. Most of the accounts from early Qing involve song-boys who were little more than servants of well-to-do men (almost exclusively officials or literati). The accounts of these relationships speak of these boys and "young men" in the highest terms, but based on what very little is available from the other perspective, it is reasonable to suspect that the reality for the majority of boys was far more bleak.
That the boy-actor's bondage became more commercial in nature, as did the relationship between literatus and actor, might be an unprecedented change in the history of male-mode relationships in China, but not suprising. Boy actors and song boys were already treated pretty much like property, so what would prevent an even further commercialization? And we get told that in the later Qing the fashion for young boys reached its highest point.
I doubt it when she claims some "homoerotic" relationship " is perhaps the most famous romance of the entire Qing dynasty. And whether same sex relationships had such a new and allegedly better status in Yuan Mei's time is also questionable. Sure, this Xu was a lifelong soulmate to Yuan Wei based on Yuan's own words and I would believe this or the relationships with Wu, Lu or Beau Gui were truly as meaningful as claimed, if not "as soon as Beau Gui had gone, Yuan immediately found another song-boy, Cao Yutian, who on Yuan's own account seems to have filled the emotional vacuum in Yangzhou perfectly." What is shown here about how Yuan Mei challenged conventional norms at the time doesn't sound like the society was anything as accepting as she claims. After all, what he writes about how people should not overreact to being advanced from other classes sounds like the usual reaction is severe. And these few examples here (Liu Xiashang x Golden Phoenix, Liu x Beau Yuan) still fall into "adult literati x teenage boy", nothing new there. except maybe that the songboys had interest as well, but considered what was stated before, we really don't know. Yuan and Liu are similar, except both seemed to be adults and literati, albeit we have no idea whether there was anything.
She really doesn't seem to get that if Yuan Mei runs the risk of becoming a moral outcast by having a physical relationship with another literati, then Qing literati were quite homophobic and not just classist, as literati would be considered both male, not female in any way. And this Zheng Xie doesn't sound better either, if he even has sex with them. She just sees what she wants to see.
She states that consorting with boy actors was a sign of civility and refinement, a fashion statement, so hard to resist "that there was little room for those not caught up in it." In the Qianglong reign, the poet Jiang Shiquan stated that any guest who exercises self-restraint will suffer the displeasure of all the others at banquets with boy actors. Her referring to this fashion of having feminized teenage boys as status symbols and social pressure to have and possibly fuck them as "male-love" is so annoying.
It took her really quite some time to consider the position of privilege enjoyed by the literati, albeit she seems to consider them victims somehow as she claims said position never gave them pause to consider the unsavoury side of their relationships, namely the utter powerlessness of the boys they 'loved'. That there wasn't much "love" involved and that the elite men rarely thought of it was clear to me chapters ago!
And here we get to something noticeable: she stopped to speak of "young men" when she decided to portray them as forced prostitutes, they are only "boys" now. And interesting how she writes: 'Elite men felt pity for the boys they found beautiful, and in some ways it was their pitifulness that made them attractive, but those same men seem to have been unable to understand how their own position contributed to that suffering.' And that "in general fate did not smile upon Chinese actors and they certainly gave far more pleasure and enjoyment than they themselves received." Looks like she quotes someone more honest than her.
The contracts for dan usually covered the entire period of their teens, and when he rose to popularity the troupe masters would find every means to continue it. The price for buying him out of his contract was astronomical. And high profits from serving wine at banquets influenced many to continue as long as possible, even after their increasing maturity began to wither away client interest. No matter how popular he might be, he would always be particularly low even among the low classes and always came from utterly destitute or disaster-ridden families or born into the profession through descent within an acting family.
The first step to training dan in Beijing involves keeping the boy inside, starving, eating only coarse gruel and few weed roots without a drop of oil or salt, the more inedible the better, for at least 1 month until the skin turns white. Other methods include grease and ointments. All for a feminized appearance and air, an imitation of women (including hairstyles and imitating bound feet). Troupe managers enhanced the illusion by giving dan flamboyant, feminized stage names (indistinguishable from women's names). In compiling their 'flower guides' reviewers eradicated, or cover over, any hint of masculinity and highest praise for dan/xianggong always spoke of their unique femininity. Which is what the author calls a homoerotic sensibility. If any other forms were common at the time we would know.
"The cream is usually under twenty" assumes at least some exceptions. Still, what she presented is disturbing. At least she has the honesty to state that e.g. none of the properties that have been so marvelously appointed actually belong to the actors themselves. In most cases it would be more accurate to describe them as one of the furnishings in a fantasy world owned by the master-trainer. Wherever the boys went they would almost always be accompanied by a gentu (literally rabbit escort) or suiren (assistant), a minder working for the master-trainer. He reports the visits, tips, gifts, that dan behaved in proper manner and upbraid them if they caused trouble. These "tigers" were greatly feared for the reports to the master could result in a severe beating.
Of course the masters were keen to get as much money out of their "flowers" as they could for the short amount of time that they could work successfully as dan. And the more money a dan made the less free he was. The descriptions available in the sources show them making use of every opportunity to 'sell' their dan to the clients.
The career of a dan was usually short from 13-18, as soon as signs of masculinity appeared on their bodies the costumers began to dissappear. Catamites began at 12 or 13 "sui", and at 14-15 sui was their prime (aka 13-14 years of age). Once they had turned twenty sui the individual prospects were quite grave, and most would begin to think of alternatives several years ahead. If they still had a strong relationship with a wealthy customer they might approach him to buy them out of their 'apprenticeship'. Some might manage to become a concubine but that never lasted due to their masculinity. Some continued the cycle of abuse and exploitation. Most were given minor stage roles or did other menial tasks.
Even in her conclusion she seems reluctant to adress the unsavory aspects of this culture. No mentioning of exploitation nor about the lack of freedom. Only shortly does she say that their conditions were mostly appalling and even then states that some were able to act in more businesslike ways and states that the best option later was to become master-trainers.
Her stating that it is a misconception to see the rise of catamites and male prostitutes as a consequence of Qing laws prohibiting officials from visiting brothels, seems really stretching now. Just like her dismissal of the suggestion that because the literati sought out catamites who had undergone 'feminization', their sexual orientation remained 'heterosexual', or at least ambiguous. She goes so far to claim that those scholars are also seen to identify with the same sublime 'feminine', and so their unions with catamites are between feminized-male and feminized-male and therefore still homoerotic. That is nonsense as the literati she portrayed were not shown to identify as feminine.
Considered that she devotes more than 1.5 pages (more than to any other topic) of her conclusion to basically dismiss the notion of Volpp that late Ming/Qing China was not so tolerant of homosexuality, I think Volpp must have touched a nerve here and makes me wonder whether the author realizes the flaws in reasoning, for one: if so accepted why is this "homoeroticism" relegated to the lowest of the low?
And just like this, the book was over, at not even 66 % of the pages.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wu Cuncun (the author of this book) is one of the most prolific scholars and writers when it comes to the topic of male homoeroticisim in pre-modern China, particularly in the late imperial period (Ming and Qing Dynasties). I have read almost all of her books and articles (both Chinese and English) and while I don't necessarily agree with all of her conclusions, I agree with most. One of her greatest strengths is her accessible writing style. Whereas many "scholars" like to show off their erudition and broad, archaic academic vocabulary or postulate on obscure theories of literary criticism that don't have any "real" meaning, Professor Wu writes in a way that anyone who is interested in this topic could read, understand, and enjoy this book, and not just a few arrogant, white-haired old academics.

I highly recommend this book, as well as any other of Professor Wu's writings if you are interested in this subject area, and I hope she keeps writing and publishing more!

[Nico Cornejo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a big step forward in the historiography of queer relations and sensibilities in China. Compared to previous books like Hinsch, Dikotter or Sommer, it provides a much more sensible (pun intended) account of the diversity or homoerotic and homosexual experiencies in the Qing Dynasty.
One of the main conclusions of the book is that there was a shift between the Ming and Qing dynasties in how homoerotic sensibilities were expressed, and this is sustained with a lot of evidence and a detailed and nuanced analysis.
Additionally, Wu quotes extensively from poems and texts, so it is a window to the types of things that were written at the time.