Scholars seeking the history of gender and sexuality in China may consider themselves fortunate: according to Susan Mann, successive Chinese regimes have long held a unique preoccupation with controlling the intimate lives of their subjects and citizens. Combined with surviving art and literature, this should provide us with an enviable trove of sources from which to reconstruct what Mann calls a “history of sex” in China. And yet, despite a long, well-documented history of state interventions in this realm, gender and sexuality remain slippery subjects to retrieve. As Mann points out, Western gender concepts lacked Chinese-language counterparts until quite recently (p. xix). These lexical ellipses indicate historically divergent conceptions of what constituted gender categories in traditional China. Terms for male and female, along with old and young, father and daughter, yin and yang, and ruler and subject, described characteristics that, depending upon their context, dictated social place and practice.
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History provides readers with a thoroughly lucid and insightful synthesis of this complex field and its challenges. Spanning centuries, Mann moves adeptly between late imperial China and the developments of the twentieth century, demonstrating that “tight links between state and sexuality in late imperial times anticipated the gender dimensions of policy in the contemporary People's Republic” (p. 49). Mann shows an enduring characteristic of Chinese culture to be an especially high tolerance for state intervention in the family and sex lives of the Chinese people.
In her introductory chapter, Mann characterizes the gender structure of imperial China by employing two archetypes: “the cloistered lady and the bare stick.” Cloistered ladies represent a Confucian ideal, most easily attainable for elite households who could afford to keep their womenfolk at home. Bare sticks (guanggun) represent their opposite: rogue men from the lower echelons of society who imperil the traditional Chinese family structure. This pair offers a useful point of departure for exploring what has changed in China and what has not. Women today are no longer valued for their virtuous isolation; but, with a skewed gender ratio of as many as 121 men born for every 100 women, the problem of the unattached man has taken on new dimensions.Footnote 2 Even as women's roles have changed, the Chinese state has remained intensely concerned with the place of women in the household.
The nine chapters that follow each address a significant theme in the study of gender and sexuality in China. Within every chapter, Mann analyzes change over time by devoting sections to “late imperial China,” “twentieth-century changes in the Republican period,” and the Communist period (which she divides into a “revolutionary Maoist phase” and the “post-Mao” period). These “temporal signposts” move the reader rapidly through time, progressively shedding more light on accrued patterns of change. The book is divided into three parts. In the first of these the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the state emerges as a carefully calibrated system of incentives and punishments. Gendered behavior, whether it be the separation of the sexes, the trade in women, or criminal transgression, was subject to state regulation as well as publicly displayed rewards.
State control is less explicit in the book's second part, devoted to the body. Here Mann presents scholarship on medicine, childbirth, sport, and footbinding and its legacy, and concludes the section with a chapter devoted to the complex decision to “abandon the body,” whether through suicide or female infanticide. Powerful cultural forces are at work at the bodies in this section, but once again state policy, education, and the state-sponsored Confucian esteem for chastity played an important role in shaping the decisions that individuals made about their bodies.
The third part of the book draws upon a range of subjects Mann demarcates as “the Other.” These final three chapters explore the realm of fantasy, same-sex relationships, and the description of sex as part of an ethnically specific set of behaviors. Scholarship in the field on these themes is more sparse than for the previous two sections. Despite the fact that the field is still developing, Mann's chapter on homosexuality illuminates what we can know by seamlessly blending a nuanced history of mentalities, retrieved from literature and art, with surviving records of behavior.
Professors eager to teach the “history of sex” in China to undergraduates now have a marvelous resource, while gender scholars from other regional specializations who hope to understand how deeply entrenched ideas around gender and sexuality in China have evolved will be able to turn to this book for insight. In her afterword, Susan Mann (citing Stephen West and Wilt Idema) suggests that the delicate topic of sex in China has been neglected by researchers (p. 199). While certainly more investigation remains to be done, the richness of Mann's book itself somewhat belies her closing assertion. She has provided a remarkable synthesis and guide to this dynamic and developing field that will enrich the study of gender and sexuality in modern China for students and researchers alike.
