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Law, Society, and Culture in China
Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China
This study of the regulation of sexuality in the Qing dynasty explores the social context for sexual behavior criminalized by the state, showing how regulation shifted away from status to a new regime of gender that mandated a uniform standard of sexual morality and criminal liability for all people, regardless of their social status.
440 pages, Hardcover
First published February 29, 2000
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January 25, 2022
When I stumble upon book on sex in later imperial China, I expect to be bombarded with contradictions. Thankfully, this book was different.
I learned a lot from this, like how to convert sui to years or that there are scholars who claim that the Manchu brought homophobia into the area of modern China. That cannot be, countless whinerbabies and closeted white supremacist have stated that it was the West who did it, it could not have been Asians!!! Ironically, in both cases such people basically claim that some foreign power was so effective to change an entire culture for centuries to come.
Apparently to the Sinologist of a certain persuasion, seventeenth-century China resembles some exotic Tahitian shore as seen through the eyes of one of Captain Bligh's lonelier sailors.
And the "jian mean", meaning, in legal terms, debased or mean people, weren't expected to conform to the confucian moral standard; more accurately, they were not entitled to conform to it. Female slaves and bondservants, married or not, were sexually available to their masters (explicitly recognized by law). The only exception if the female slave belongs to someone else. Sounds like it really sucks to be a mean person, which makes the romanticized accounts by literati about prostitutes and actors even worse.
Consensual anal intercourse between males had been prohibited since the Ming dynasty; now, for the first time, lawmakers defined an explicit crime of homosexual rape, for which they imposed harsh penalties. Sodomy offenses were assimilated to the previously heterosexual category of "illicit sexual intercourse" (jian). Qianlong judiciary also issued unprecedented legislation on self-defense against homosexual rape, which became a mitigating factor in the punishment of homicide. These measurcs implied a new anxiety over vulnerable masculinity. The imperial chastity cult was greatly expanded over its Ming and early Qing precedents and involved a further reduction of different female roles into "wife."
Also, back then the region had the problem of surplus men. A rising proportion of men lacked the resources to marry and reproduce, and so fell through the cracks of society. By the 19th century it was fueling endemic low-level violence in poor regions. Then there is the problem of female infanticide (present since the Song dynasty) and the fact that less poor women are available due to the polygyny of the elite and this situation worsened under the Qing. Combine that with the steady population growth until at least the mid-19th century and you have many unwed men (often referred to as rogue males, a vagrant underclass). Which could explain the rise of female impersonator prostitutes.
Speaking of prostitution: most studies in the Ming and Qing focus on elite courtesans, but the author found husbands pimping out their wives or peasant women working in brothels or "music households." In the legal cases he researched the opera patronage or libertines who fuck teenage boys are also missing, he found beggars, monks, laborers and the like. Quite interesting. His sources were limited though (he relied on the archives in Beijing and Taipei) due to the many destructions in China from the Taiping rebellion through to the Cultural Revolution.
This connection between sexual and political disorder was not just a question of semantics or of Confucian abstraction. Late imperial officials expressly associated improper sexual and gender relations with politically suspect tendencies in popular culture. And shit, you had to do a lot of stuff to have a legitimate marriage. And there was no need for Chinese legal theorists to pretend that a wife's consent played any role in legitimizing sexual intercourse within marriage. In fact, a woman's "consent" (he) bore legal relevance exclusively as a form of crime: "consensual illicit sex" (he jian). No Chinese jurist seems to have felt compelled to ponder the concept of "marital rape," even as a theoretical absurdity to be explained away.
Furthermore, while the chastity of free commoner women did not apply to female slaves, they were to be sexually available only to their own masters, and could not be forced into the "parallel" debased-status category of hereditary sex workers. And Qing laws were really into making every woman basically a wife. Which is really concerning. How did they think that in their mind a woman is only, theoretically, protected from rape if she is married to a man.
his change in imperial law is a quintessential mixed bag, on the one hand its good to have consistent standards across status lines, but on the other, it basically says sex is only legal within marriage and takes a severe toll on women. Not to mention that its rules regarding illicit sex still didn't protect anyone considered to be beneath the law (aka of mean status) during early Qing. That Yuan Law on being able to sell an unchaste wife into prostitution/slavery is not good either. And its not as if the Ming law was better. This linkage between social status and chastity for women seems really severe, especially considered how broad the definition of "consent" in case of rape accusations is, unless she resisted violently she is basically assumed to have consented. And any wife who had been sold was considered unchaste by default no matter whether the selling was considered legal or not. The logic was: she is unchaste so that is why the husband sold her.
Late imperial jurists thought of rape in terms of pollution: the pollution of descent lines, of commoner status, and especially of female chastity and Qing rape law "was intended to help further promote the cult of chastity," and thus realize "the Neo-Confucian social order". The moral norms of marriage and family, especially female chastity, were attributes of free, liang, status; to be perfectly accurate, liang status was a prerequisite for a woman even to aspire to chastity. Female slaves (even married ones) possessed no legally recognized chastity-they were sexually available to their masters, whether they liked it or not.
Just as consent did not necessarily imply active, voluntary participation, a judgment of coercion depended less on what the rapist did than on how the woman reacted. That judgment and the extreme penalty that went with it were measures of the woman's extraordinary vigilance in defense of her husband's sexual monopoly, they were rewards to the woman for having met such a difficult test of her chastity.
To switch the subject: if Meijer is right and Qing laws against consensual sex between males was "simply part of a consistent effort to ban all "sexual intercourse" outside marriage", why was lesbian sex not even mentioned, or stuff like masturbation not banned? If Vivien Ng is right in claiming it came from conservative elites, why not punish it more? And if Hinsch is right, why is there no equivalent among the Manchu? Manchu tradition forbade sex in fewer contexts than did Ming law; the Qing founders even abandoned certain marriage customs to conform to Chinese incest taboos (Zhang Jinfan and Guo Chengkang 1988, 485). The author found no evidence of ethnic Manchu influence on any aspect of, the Qing regulation of sexuality.
During these times gender implied hierarchy, and since sexual roles defined gender roles, the act of sexual intercourse was seen as a gendered expression of domination. The penetration of a male upset the proper hierarchy of gender, in which masculinity was defined by the penetrant role in the division of sexual labor, corresponding to the husband/father role in the division of social labor. Classic tales of same-sex union from the formative and early imperial eras tend to locate homosexual penetration in a context in which status domination apparently overrode any disturbing aspect of gender inversion. The most famous tales tell of feudal lords or emperors favoring catamites who are celebrated for youth and feminine beauty.
From the Song dynasty through the Qing, judicial interest in male homosexual acts cansistently focused an phallic penetration of the anus, the division af sexual roles thereby implied, and the stigma af the penetrated male. Song lawmakers associated the penetrated role with cross-dressing and with the debased legal status of prostitutes, and that they sought to punish males who consented to such degradation.
And from 1679 until 1734, the penalty for simple homosexual rape (immediate beheading) was more severe than that for simple heterosexual rape (strangulation after the assizes).
And the rape was only "consummated" if the penis entered the anus/vagina, after 1734, any sodomy offense not covered in the code was judged by precise analogy to the corresponding heterosexual offense. However, no law addressed the issue of homosexual relations between masters and their servants, slaves, or hired laborers. And it was unlikely to be prosecuted, regardless of the degree of coercion involved.
Qing law recognized no legitimate context for homosexual intercourse that corresponded to marriage. And if a man were shameless enough to consent to being penetrated, the harm he might suffer by being raped could not be great enough to warrant the death penalty for the rapist. Qing law acknowledged that males could be raped, and that they might consent to sodomy. But for this penetrability to make sense, the male had to be somehow less than male. Only a powerless male could be penetrated against his will-and the most unambiguous form of male powerlessness was youth. This has no straight equivalent and explains something about catamites. In connection to this, there existed a strong judicial bias against accepting an older male as a rape victim. Even with an adolescent, judges might exhibit great skepticism about whether coercion had truly been used to consummate sodomy. The clearest expression of judicial skepticism came in the prosecution of men who committed homicide in self-defense they claimed against rape.
In this regard the Taiping had the same attitudes as the Qing judicary regarding the rape of males. Although they went further and if both are over 13 sui, both will be beheaded as they then consider it to be consensual. I know that they had a christian component but considering how close they are otherwise to the Qing, I suspect this to be something homegrown rather than imported. The discourse never included men who penetrated other males, any more than it included men who engaged in illicit sex with women; it applied only to males and females positioned in the "female" sexual role.
In vernacular fiction from the late Ming and Qing, we find a counterpart to this aggressive penetrator, in the role of the libertine. In object choice, the libertine is bisexual, although his primary obsession is women. Like the rootless rascal, the danger that the libertine represents is his insatiable pursuit of sexuFor the aggressive penetrator, in Qing legal cases as well as in Ming-Qing fiction, the young male is cast in the "female" role as a penetrated object, and the penetrator seems attracted to the same kinds of feminized features regardless of the sex of the individual who possesses them. And this seems connected to an anxiety over the ambiguous gender of the adolescent boy, whose adult masculinity has not yet been confirmed by the social and sexual roles taken up with marriage. In some cases (like older monks/daoist priests) it seems the result of an abusive cycle that goes on and on. Despite the fact that cases from various regions reveal a pervasive, powerful stigma attached to the penetrated male, a stigma that did not touch his partner, at least not to that degree. The same men who wanted to penetrate others violently refused to be penetrated themselves. And said stigma is so strong that in a case where a man attempted to rape a boy of nine sui, said boy's father strangled the boy because of the loss of face for having a penetrated son. And the stigma was so big, even those in affectionate relationships feared exposure. And the overwhelming majority of cases the author has seen of homosexual relations deemed consensual by the Qing judiciary also involve marginalized males-that is, men excluded from mainstream patterns of marriage and household by some combination of poverty, status, and occupation.
lt stands to reason that the growing numbers of surplus males would have raised the profile of same-sex unions and of homosexual rape in both peasant society and judicial caseloads. Perhaps this helps explain the new perception of a threat to masculinity. If homosexual union was associated with desperate, marginal males, then the penetrated role was the lowest a male could possibly sink. Qing jurists aimed to channel behavior into accepted gender roles-an ever greater priority as other social boundaries blurred. The spate of new laws against sodomy betrayed increasing fear of the threat to vulnerable males, but also, perhaps, of their possible enjoyment of roles that conflicted radically with the demands of order.
The Qing's obsession with sexual order had one interesting effect: A widow who could claim chastity enjoyed legal rights unique among women. Anyone who forced her to remarry, including her own parents or parents-in-law, risked serious penalties. No other woman had the right to refuse to marry (with the exception of female clergy, who as a rule acquired such status either with parental approval or after being widowed)-certainly no unmarried daughter could go to court to defy her parents on this matter (or on any other!). And chaste widows were prime fodder for Qing propaganda.
However, the chastity so celebrated by the Qing state was literally unaffordable for many widows. It is not unusual to learn from case records that a widow remarried quickly in order to raise enough money to liquidate the debts of her first husband, or even to finance his burial. Some also had to go to prostitution. And during a long period of fundamental continuity up to 1723, prostitution was one factor used by the imperial state to support the legal fiction of a fixed hierarchy of status groups to which distinct moral standards applied. For certain legally debased (jian) groups, sex work constituted an essential stigma that defined their social and legal status. It suggests comparison with imperial Rome, which honored a sacred cult of vestal virgins, and made the adultery of a freeborn woman a grievous offense. Nevertheless, it had no trouble accepting and regulating the public existence of prostitute guilds. In Rome, as in China, the central issue was to organize sexual behavior in such a way as to confirm and reinforce the normative basis of social and political hierarchy. Furthermore, "prostitution" is a misnomer for much of this period, it implies paid work in a commercial sex market, and at least the possibility of female agency and choice. The sexual servitude described here was really a form of slavery, not unlike the use of sexual slaves by the Japanese army during World War II, only in the late Ming + Qing dynasties we see the emergence of a pervasive, private commercial sex market.
Of course, that didn't last long either as during the Qing times, there were several reforms. However these Yongzheng reforms really sound like they were more about the morality of the imperial households than the people in question. Which might explain why musician families had better chances to get into the examination system after a few generations than prostitutes and actors. Music was considered more important. And by extending commoner standards of sexual morality and criminal liability, the Yongzheng edicts eliminated the legal space for tolerated sex work.
But despite its reforms and chastity cult, prostitution was never eliminated from the Qing empire; indeed, the business seems to have flourished evcn in Beijing. Yan Ming suggests that the end of official prostitution actually had the ironic effect of stimulating private, commercial prostitution, which expanded to fill the void. But even if it was ubiquitous, sex work remained illegal.
The Yongzheng vision of "self-renewal" began with the criminalization of the sex work that had provided a living for many people and it was less an offer of personal liberation than a sharp narrowing of the scope of acceptable activity, backed by intensified official surveillance and the threat of criminal prosecution. All prostitutes and their customers were now defined as ordinary adulterers, a pimp was reconceptualized as something far more dangerous. Now that all potential recruits for prostitution were viewed as commoners, a pimp had to be considered a parasite who profited from the systematic pollution of chaste women.
Coming back to homosexual things: The absence of any mention of sodomy in early law reflects, I suspect, an aristocratic assumption that homosexual penetration was something one did to one's slave or servant as a pastime; in this context, the gender inversion of the penetrated male simply confirmed his subordinate position in the more important hierarchy of legal status.
Qing innovations on sodomy had nothing to do with elite men, who were disposed to patronize cross-dressing actors and male prostitutes, and continued to do so, regardless of the law; this fact reflects their practical privileges, but also, perhaps, the older aristocratic assumption that the gender inversion of the penetrated male was no cause for concern as long as it conformed to the proper order of status domination.
The ban on prostitution (like that on wife-selling) seems to have had nothing to do with elite tastes and practices either. The prohibition certainly included all prostitution, but none of the records of actual prosecution that the author has seen involve anyone remotely connected with the elite.
As good as the book was, it has one flaw: it just ended. No conclusion, no afterword, no nothing.
I learned a lot from this, like how to convert sui to years or that there are scholars who claim that the Manchu brought homophobia into the area of modern China. That cannot be, countless whinerbabies and closeted white supremacist have stated that it was the West who did it, it could not have been Asians!!! Ironically, in both cases such people basically claim that some foreign power was so effective to change an entire culture for centuries to come.
Apparently to the Sinologist of a certain persuasion, seventeenth-century China resembles some exotic Tahitian shore as seen through the eyes of one of Captain Bligh's lonelier sailors.
And the "jian mean", meaning, in legal terms, debased or mean people, weren't expected to conform to the confucian moral standard; more accurately, they were not entitled to conform to it. Female slaves and bondservants, married or not, were sexually available to their masters (explicitly recognized by law). The only exception if the female slave belongs to someone else. Sounds like it really sucks to be a mean person, which makes the romanticized accounts by literati about prostitutes and actors even worse.
Consensual anal intercourse between males had been prohibited since the Ming dynasty; now, for the first time, lawmakers defined an explicit crime of homosexual rape, for which they imposed harsh penalties. Sodomy offenses were assimilated to the previously heterosexual category of "illicit sexual intercourse" (jian). Qianlong judiciary also issued unprecedented legislation on self-defense against homosexual rape, which became a mitigating factor in the punishment of homicide. These measurcs implied a new anxiety over vulnerable masculinity. The imperial chastity cult was greatly expanded over its Ming and early Qing precedents and involved a further reduction of different female roles into "wife."
Also, back then the region had the problem of surplus men. A rising proportion of men lacked the resources to marry and reproduce, and so fell through the cracks of society. By the 19th century it was fueling endemic low-level violence in poor regions. Then there is the problem of female infanticide (present since the Song dynasty) and the fact that less poor women are available due to the polygyny of the elite and this situation worsened under the Qing. Combine that with the steady population growth until at least the mid-19th century and you have many unwed men (often referred to as rogue males, a vagrant underclass). Which could explain the rise of female impersonator prostitutes.
Speaking of prostitution: most studies in the Ming and Qing focus on elite courtesans, but the author found husbands pimping out their wives or peasant women working in brothels or "music households." In the legal cases he researched the opera patronage or libertines who fuck teenage boys are also missing, he found beggars, monks, laborers and the like. Quite interesting. His sources were limited though (he relied on the archives in Beijing and Taipei) due to the many destructions in China from the Taiping rebellion through to the Cultural Revolution.
This connection between sexual and political disorder was not just a question of semantics or of Confucian abstraction. Late imperial officials expressly associated improper sexual and gender relations with politically suspect tendencies in popular culture. And shit, you had to do a lot of stuff to have a legitimate marriage. And there was no need for Chinese legal theorists to pretend that a wife's consent played any role in legitimizing sexual intercourse within marriage. In fact, a woman's "consent" (he) bore legal relevance exclusively as a form of crime: "consensual illicit sex" (he jian). No Chinese jurist seems to have felt compelled to ponder the concept of "marital rape," even as a theoretical absurdity to be explained away.
Furthermore, while the chastity of free commoner women did not apply to female slaves, they were to be sexually available only to their own masters, and could not be forced into the "parallel" debased-status category of hereditary sex workers. And Qing laws were really into making every woman basically a wife. Which is really concerning. How did they think that in their mind a woman is only, theoretically, protected from rape if she is married to a man.
his change in imperial law is a quintessential mixed bag, on the one hand its good to have consistent standards across status lines, but on the other, it basically says sex is only legal within marriage and takes a severe toll on women. Not to mention that its rules regarding illicit sex still didn't protect anyone considered to be beneath the law (aka of mean status) during early Qing. That Yuan Law on being able to sell an unchaste wife into prostitution/slavery is not good either. And its not as if the Ming law was better. This linkage between social status and chastity for women seems really severe, especially considered how broad the definition of "consent" in case of rape accusations is, unless she resisted violently she is basically assumed to have consented. And any wife who had been sold was considered unchaste by default no matter whether the selling was considered legal or not. The logic was: she is unchaste so that is why the husband sold her.
Late imperial jurists thought of rape in terms of pollution: the pollution of descent lines, of commoner status, and especially of female chastity and Qing rape law "was intended to help further promote the cult of chastity," and thus realize "the Neo-Confucian social order". The moral norms of marriage and family, especially female chastity, were attributes of free, liang, status; to be perfectly accurate, liang status was a prerequisite for a woman even to aspire to chastity. Female slaves (even married ones) possessed no legally recognized chastity-they were sexually available to their masters, whether they liked it or not.
Just as consent did not necessarily imply active, voluntary participation, a judgment of coercion depended less on what the rapist did than on how the woman reacted. That judgment and the extreme penalty that went with it were measures of the woman's extraordinary vigilance in defense of her husband's sexual monopoly, they were rewards to the woman for having met such a difficult test of her chastity.
To switch the subject: if Meijer is right and Qing laws against consensual sex between males was "simply part of a consistent effort to ban all "sexual intercourse" outside marriage", why was lesbian sex not even mentioned, or stuff like masturbation not banned? If Vivien Ng is right in claiming it came from conservative elites, why not punish it more? And if Hinsch is right, why is there no equivalent among the Manchu? Manchu tradition forbade sex in fewer contexts than did Ming law; the Qing founders even abandoned certain marriage customs to conform to Chinese incest taboos (Zhang Jinfan and Guo Chengkang 1988, 485). The author found no evidence of ethnic Manchu influence on any aspect of, the Qing regulation of sexuality.
During these times gender implied hierarchy, and since sexual roles defined gender roles, the act of sexual intercourse was seen as a gendered expression of domination. The penetration of a male upset the proper hierarchy of gender, in which masculinity was defined by the penetrant role in the division of sexual labor, corresponding to the husband/father role in the division of social labor. Classic tales of same-sex union from the formative and early imperial eras tend to locate homosexual penetration in a context in which status domination apparently overrode any disturbing aspect of gender inversion. The most famous tales tell of feudal lords or emperors favoring catamites who are celebrated for youth and feminine beauty.
From the Song dynasty through the Qing, judicial interest in male homosexual acts cansistently focused an phallic penetration of the anus, the division af sexual roles thereby implied, and the stigma af the penetrated male. Song lawmakers associated the penetrated role with cross-dressing and with the debased legal status of prostitutes, and that they sought to punish males who consented to such degradation.
And from 1679 until 1734, the penalty for simple homosexual rape (immediate beheading) was more severe than that for simple heterosexual rape (strangulation after the assizes).
And the rape was only "consummated" if the penis entered the anus/vagina, after 1734, any sodomy offense not covered in the code was judged by precise analogy to the corresponding heterosexual offense. However, no law addressed the issue of homosexual relations between masters and their servants, slaves, or hired laborers. And it was unlikely to be prosecuted, regardless of the degree of coercion involved.
Qing law recognized no legitimate context for homosexual intercourse that corresponded to marriage. And if a man were shameless enough to consent to being penetrated, the harm he might suffer by being raped could not be great enough to warrant the death penalty for the rapist. Qing law acknowledged that males could be raped, and that they might consent to sodomy. But for this penetrability to make sense, the male had to be somehow less than male. Only a powerless male could be penetrated against his will-and the most unambiguous form of male powerlessness was youth. This has no straight equivalent and explains something about catamites. In connection to this, there existed a strong judicial bias against accepting an older male as a rape victim. Even with an adolescent, judges might exhibit great skepticism about whether coercion had truly been used to consummate sodomy. The clearest expression of judicial skepticism came in the prosecution of men who committed homicide in self-defense they claimed against rape.
In this regard the Taiping had the same attitudes as the Qing judicary regarding the rape of males. Although they went further and if both are over 13 sui, both will be beheaded as they then consider it to be consensual. I know that they had a christian component but considering how close they are otherwise to the Qing, I suspect this to be something homegrown rather than imported. The discourse never included men who penetrated other males, any more than it included men who engaged in illicit sex with women; it applied only to males and females positioned in the "female" sexual role.
In vernacular fiction from the late Ming and Qing, we find a counterpart to this aggressive penetrator, in the role of the libertine. In object choice, the libertine is bisexual, although his primary obsession is women. Like the rootless rascal, the danger that the libertine represents is his insatiable pursuit of sexuFor the aggressive penetrator, in Qing legal cases as well as in Ming-Qing fiction, the young male is cast in the "female" role as a penetrated object, and the penetrator seems attracted to the same kinds of feminized features regardless of the sex of the individual who possesses them. And this seems connected to an anxiety over the ambiguous gender of the adolescent boy, whose adult masculinity has not yet been confirmed by the social and sexual roles taken up with marriage. In some cases (like older monks/daoist priests) it seems the result of an abusive cycle that goes on and on. Despite the fact that cases from various regions reveal a pervasive, powerful stigma attached to the penetrated male, a stigma that did not touch his partner, at least not to that degree. The same men who wanted to penetrate others violently refused to be penetrated themselves. And said stigma is so strong that in a case where a man attempted to rape a boy of nine sui, said boy's father strangled the boy because of the loss of face for having a penetrated son. And the stigma was so big, even those in affectionate relationships feared exposure. And the overwhelming majority of cases the author has seen of homosexual relations deemed consensual by the Qing judiciary also involve marginalized males-that is, men excluded from mainstream patterns of marriage and household by some combination of poverty, status, and occupation.
lt stands to reason that the growing numbers of surplus males would have raised the profile of same-sex unions and of homosexual rape in both peasant society and judicial caseloads. Perhaps this helps explain the new perception of a threat to masculinity. If homosexual union was associated with desperate, marginal males, then the penetrated role was the lowest a male could possibly sink. Qing jurists aimed to channel behavior into accepted gender roles-an ever greater priority as other social boundaries blurred. The spate of new laws against sodomy betrayed increasing fear of the threat to vulnerable males, but also, perhaps, of their possible enjoyment of roles that conflicted radically with the demands of order.
The Qing's obsession with sexual order had one interesting effect: A widow who could claim chastity enjoyed legal rights unique among women. Anyone who forced her to remarry, including her own parents or parents-in-law, risked serious penalties. No other woman had the right to refuse to marry (with the exception of female clergy, who as a rule acquired such status either with parental approval or after being widowed)-certainly no unmarried daughter could go to court to defy her parents on this matter (or on any other!). And chaste widows were prime fodder for Qing propaganda.
However, the chastity so celebrated by the Qing state was literally unaffordable for many widows. It is not unusual to learn from case records that a widow remarried quickly in order to raise enough money to liquidate the debts of her first husband, or even to finance his burial. Some also had to go to prostitution. And during a long period of fundamental continuity up to 1723, prostitution was one factor used by the imperial state to support the legal fiction of a fixed hierarchy of status groups to which distinct moral standards applied. For certain legally debased (jian) groups, sex work constituted an essential stigma that defined their social and legal status. It suggests comparison with imperial Rome, which honored a sacred cult of vestal virgins, and made the adultery of a freeborn woman a grievous offense. Nevertheless, it had no trouble accepting and regulating the public existence of prostitute guilds. In Rome, as in China, the central issue was to organize sexual behavior in such a way as to confirm and reinforce the normative basis of social and political hierarchy. Furthermore, "prostitution" is a misnomer for much of this period, it implies paid work in a commercial sex market, and at least the possibility of female agency and choice. The sexual servitude described here was really a form of slavery, not unlike the use of sexual slaves by the Japanese army during World War II, only in the late Ming + Qing dynasties we see the emergence of a pervasive, private commercial sex market.
Of course, that didn't last long either as during the Qing times, there were several reforms. However these Yongzheng reforms really sound like they were more about the morality of the imperial households than the people in question. Which might explain why musician families had better chances to get into the examination system after a few generations than prostitutes and actors. Music was considered more important. And by extending commoner standards of sexual morality and criminal liability, the Yongzheng edicts eliminated the legal space for tolerated sex work.
But despite its reforms and chastity cult, prostitution was never eliminated from the Qing empire; indeed, the business seems to have flourished evcn in Beijing. Yan Ming suggests that the end of official prostitution actually had the ironic effect of stimulating private, commercial prostitution, which expanded to fill the void. But even if it was ubiquitous, sex work remained illegal.
The Yongzheng vision of "self-renewal" began with the criminalization of the sex work that had provided a living for many people and it was less an offer of personal liberation than a sharp narrowing of the scope of acceptable activity, backed by intensified official surveillance and the threat of criminal prosecution. All prostitutes and their customers were now defined as ordinary adulterers, a pimp was reconceptualized as something far more dangerous. Now that all potential recruits for prostitution were viewed as commoners, a pimp had to be considered a parasite who profited from the systematic pollution of chaste women.
Coming back to homosexual things: The absence of any mention of sodomy in early law reflects, I suspect, an aristocratic assumption that homosexual penetration was something one did to one's slave or servant as a pastime; in this context, the gender inversion of the penetrated male simply confirmed his subordinate position in the more important hierarchy of legal status.
Qing innovations on sodomy had nothing to do with elite men, who were disposed to patronize cross-dressing actors and male prostitutes, and continued to do so, regardless of the law; this fact reflects their practical privileges, but also, perhaps, the older aristocratic assumption that the gender inversion of the penetrated male was no cause for concern as long as it conformed to the proper order of status domination.
The ban on prostitution (like that on wife-selling) seems to have had nothing to do with elite tastes and practices either. The prohibition certainly included all prostitution, but none of the records of actual prosecution that the author has seen involve anyone remotely connected with the elite.
As good as the book was, it has one flaw: it just ended. No conclusion, no afterword, no nothing.
March 13, 2024
在當時那樣的一個父權社會中，一切看待及審判「性」和「貞節」的角度都不是基於個人的，而是和權力結構和社會息息相關。在審判個人之前，根據插入及被插入、良和善、男和女的區分，一個人的性質和即將受到的懲罰已經被決定了一半。總體來說有非常高的信息量，只是之中有一點責怪女性維護這個體系言論讓我如鯁在喉。
January 13, 2022
A study of Chinese gender history from the perspective of legal history. The author argues that the Qing dynasty made great efforts to maintain the patriarchal system by law, so that patriarchy, property distribution and individuals were within the ternary normative order of family organization under state control. These laws start from a normative gender order and seek to shape a series of governing persons who are governed by sexual discipline.
September 21, 2015
a nice use of ethnographic evidence in Qing legal cases ... from status performance to gender performance.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews