Andre’s Reviews > Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China > Status Update

And, done with the main text.

Given our
libe~ationist paradigm for thinking about women's history and gay-
lesb1an history, it is possible to miss the fact that Qing. initiatives
aimed not so much to repress women (let alone sexual minorities)
as to strengthen an embattled peasant family against the moral im-
plications of downward mobility and the possibly very real preda-
tions of a swelling underclass of "rootless rascals."

We find a
comparable innovation in the law on "males who commit homicide
in self-defense against rape": an amendment of 1824 mandated le-
nience for a male who had consented to being penetrated but later
"repented" (hui guo) and rejected the penetrator's subsequent ad-
vances, finally killing him in order to avoid being raped

The ban on prostitution (like that on wife-selling) seems to have
had nothing to do with elite tastes and practices either. The prohibi-
tion certainly included all prostitutiun, but none of the records of
actual prosecution that I have seen involve anyone remotely con-
nected with the elite.

Qing innovations on sodomy had nothing to do with...Elite men who were disposed to patronize cross-dressing actors and male prostitutes 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 absence of any mention of sodomy in
early law reflects, I suspect, an aristocratic assumption that homo-
sexual 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 impor-
tant hierarchy of legal status.

he Ming dynasty ex-
tended chastity honors to martyred victims of attempted rape, ex-
panded the death penalty to cover all rapes between status equals,
imposed a stricter standard of evidence for rape conviction, and
banned consensual homosexual sodomy for the first time.

By extension, the act of penetration could imply initiation and domination in other contexts: for example, pirates sodomized male captives in order to initiate them into their ranks, or a widow might have her sexual partner rape her daughter-in-law to make her, in effect, a coconspirator in their illicit affair.

f all prostitutes and their customers were now de-
fined as ordinary adulterers, a pimp was reconceptualized as some-
thing far more dangerous. Now that all potential recruits for prosti-
tution were viewed as commoners, a pimp had to be considered a
parasite who profited from the systematic pollution of chaste women.

The Yongzheng vision of "self-renewal" began with the criminalization of the sex work that had provided a living for many of these people: 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.