Sex, Culture and Modernity in China

Sex, Culture and Modernity in China PDF Author: Frank Dikotter
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9622093825
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
With the disintegration of Confucian cosmology after the fall of the imperial system in China, medical science was introduced as an epistemological foundation for social order. the construction of sexuality as a dangerous drive which was thought to form t

Sex, Culture and Modernity in China

Sex, Culture and Modernity in China PDF Author: Frank Dikotter
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9622093825
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book Here

Book Description
With the disintegration of Confucian cosmology after the fall of the imperial system in China, medical science was introduced as an epistemological foundation for social order. the construction of sexuality as a dangerous drive which was thought to form t

After Eunuchs

After Eunuchs PDF Author: Howard Chiang
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231546335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
For much of Chinese history, the eunuch stood out as an exceptional figure at the margins of gender categories. Amid the disintegration of the Qing Empire, men and women in China began to understand their differences in the language of modern science. In After Eunuchs, Howard Chiang traces the genealogy of sexual knowledge from the demise of eunuchism to the emergence of transsexuality, showing the centrality of new epistemic structures to the formation of Chinese modernity. From anticastration discourses in the late Qing era to sex-reassignment surgeries in Taiwan in the 1950s and queer movements in the 1980s and 1990s, After Eunuchs explores the ways the introduction of Western biomedical sciences transformed normative meanings of gender, sexuality, and the body in China. Chiang investigates how competing definitions of sex circulated in science, medicine, vernacular culture, and the periodical press, bringing to light a rich and vibrant discourse of sex change in the first half of the twentieth century. He focuses on the stories of gender and sexual minorities as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, philosophers, educators, reformers, journalists, and tabloid writers, as they debated the questions of political sovereignty, national belonging, cultural authenticity, scientific modernity, human difference, and the power and authority of truths about sex. Theoretically sophisticated and far-reaching, After Eunuchs is an innovative contribution to the history and philosophy of science and queer and Sinophone studies.

The Emerging Lesbian

The Emerging Lesbian PDF Author: Tze-Lan D. Sang
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226734781
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
In early twentieth-century China, age-old traditions of homosocial and homoerotic relationships between women suddenly became an issue of widespread public concern. Discussed formerly in terms of friendship and sisterhood, these relationships came to be associated with feminism, on the one hand, and psychobiological perversion, on the other—a radical shift whose origins have long been unclear. In this first ever book-length study of Chinese lesbians, Tze-lan D. Sang convincingly ties the debate over female same-sex love in China to the emergence of Chinese modernity. As women's participation in social, economic, and political affairs grew, Sang argues, so too did the societal significance of their romantic and sexual relations. Focusing especially on literature by or about women-preferring women, Sang traces the history of female same-sex relations in China from the late imperial period (1600-1911) through the Republican era (1912-1949). She ends by examining the reemergence of public debate on lesbians in China after Mao and in Taiwan after martial law, including the important roles played by globalization and identity politics.

Appetites

Appetites PDF Author: Judith Farquhar
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822329213
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
DIVAn experimental ethnography of food, sex, and health in post-socialist China/div

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese History PDF Author: Susan L. Mann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139502484
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Gender and sexuality have been neglected topics in the history of Chinese civilization, despite the fact that there is a massive amount of historical evidence on the subject. China's late imperial government was arguably more concerned about gender and sexuality among its subjects than any other pre-modern state. How did these and other late imperial legacies shape twentieth-century notions of gender and sexuality in modern China? Susan Mann answers this by focusing on state policy, ideas about the physical body and notions of sexuality and difference in China's recent history, from medicine to the theater to the gay bars; from law to art and sports. More broadly, the book shows how changes in attitudes toward sex and gender in China during the twentieth century have cast a new light on the process of becoming modern, while simultaneously challenging the universalizing assumptions of Western modernity.

Opening Up

Opening Up PDF Author: James Farrer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226238708
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description
From teen dating to public displays of affection, from the "fishing girls" and "big moneys" that wander discos in search of romance to the changing shape of sex in the Chinese city, this is a book like no other. James Farrer immerses himself in the vibrant nightlife of Shanghai, draws on individual and group interviews with Chinese youth, as well as recent changes in popular media, and considers how sexual culture has changed in China since its shift to a more market-based economy. More and more men and women in China these days are having sex before marriage, creating a new youth sex culture based on romance, leisure, and free choice. The Chinese themselves describe these changes as an "opening up" in response to foreign influences and increased Westernization. Farrer explores these changes by tracing the basic elements in talk about sex and sexuality in Shanghai. He then shows how Chinese youth act out the sometimes-contradictory meanings of sex in the new market society. For Farrer, sexuality is a lens through which we can see how China imagines and understands itself in the wake of increased globalization. Through personal storytelling, neighborhood gossip, and games of seduction, young men and women in Shanghai balance pragmatism with romance, lust with love, and seriousness with play, collectively constructing and individually coping with a new culture based on market principles. With its provocative glimpse into the sex lives of young Chinese, then, Opening Up offers something even greater: a thoughtful consideration of China as it continues to develop into an economic superpower.

Sex, Culture, and Modernity in China

Sex, Culture, and Modernity in China PDF Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824816766
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
With the disintegration of Confucian cosmology after the fall of the imperial system in China, medical science was introduced as an epistemological foundation for social order. The construction of sexuality as a dangerous drive which was thought to form the very core of the individual led to the emergence of a wide range of identities like the menstruating girl, the hysterical housewife, the masturbating adolescent and the syphilitic husband. The naturalization of desire also introduced a tension between the sexual responsibilities of the individual and the coercive intervention of civil society in the name of the collective health of future generations. Although new categories of analysis, such as 'population', 'race', 'sex', 'woman' and 'youth' were introduced to early Republican China from abroad, their reception and adaptation were founded on cultural reorientations which may have taken place as long before as the 17th and 18th centuries. Instead of describing the rise of normative naturalism as a derivative discourse from 'the West', this book recognizes that the roots of modernizing representations may have had to be sought in a rich and diverse past in China itself. The author's analysis is based on medical and lay texts such as handbooks, marriage guides and introductions to physiology and sexual hygiene. The epilogue demonstrates how the sexual identities invented early this century are still in place in China today.

Desiring China

Desiring China PDF Author: Lisa Rofel
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822389908
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Through window displays, newspapers, soap operas, gay bars, and other public culture venues, Chinese citizens are negotiating what it means to be cosmopolitan citizens of the world, with appropriate needs, aspirations, and longings. Lisa Rofel argues that the creation of such “desiring subjects” is at the core of China’s contingent, piece-by-piece reconfiguration of its relationship to a post-socialist world. In a study at once ethnographic, historical, and theoretical, she contends that neoliberal subjectivities are created through the production of various desires—material, sexual, and affective—and that it is largely through their engagements with public culture that people in China are imagining and practicing appropriate desires for the post-Mao era. Drawing on her research over the past two decades among urban residents and rural migrants in Hangzhou and Beijing, Rofel analyzes the meanings that individuals attach to various public cultural phenomena and what their interpretations say about their understandings of post-socialist China and their roles within it. She locates the first broad-based public debate about post-Mao social changes in the passionate dialogues about the popular 1991 television soap opera Yearnings. She describes how the emergence of gay identities and practices in China reveals connections to a transnational network of lesbians and gay men at the same time that it brings urban/rural and class divisions to the fore. The 1999–2001 negotiations over China’s entry into the World Trade Organization; a controversial women’s museum; the ways that young single women portray their longings in relation to the privations they imagine their mothers experienced; adjudications of the limits of self-interest in court cases related to homoerotic desire, intellectual property, and consumer fraud—Rofel reveals all of these as sites where desiring subjects come into being.

East Asian Sexualities

East Asian Sexualities PDF Author: Stevi Jackson
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1848136528
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
This book paints a vivid picture of women's active involvement in reshaping intimate and public sexual life in East Asia. In bringing together exciting new feminist research on sexuality from East Asia and making it available to a wider audience, East Asian Sexualities unsettles stereotypes, rectifies lack of awareness and demonstrates that East Asia matters. The chapters address the diversity and variety of everyday sexual lives and sexual politics in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. They range from workplace sexual cultures, trans-national sexual relations, the conditions of sex-work and the emergence of new sexual desires, cultures and movements. The contributors highlight the gendered and sexual consequences of globalization and rapid social change. In doing so, they engage with western debates on late modernity while also exploring the contested understandings of modernization and westernization in the East. This is a collection which illuminates the local situations in which women's sexual lives are lived and offers fresh perspectives on global issues.

Sex in China

Sex in China PDF Author: Elaine Jeffreys
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745685943
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 Sex in China introduces readers to some of the dramatic shifts that have taken place in Chinese sexual behaviours and attitudes, and public discussions of sex, since the 1980s. The book explores what it means to talk about sex in present-day China, where sex and sexuality are more and more visible in everyday life. Elaine Jeffreys and Haiqing Yu situate Chinas changing sexual culture, and how it is governed, in the socio-political history of the Peoples Republic of China. They demonstrate that Chinese governmental authorities and policies do not set out strictly to repress sex; they also create spaces for the emergence of new sexual subjects and subjectivities. They discuss the complexities surrounding the ongoing explosion of commentary on sex and sexuality in the PRC, and the emergence of new sexual behaviours and mores. Sex in China offers clear, critical coverage of sex-related issues that are a focus of public concern and debate in China - chapters focus on sex studies; marriage and family planning; youth and sex(iness); gay, lesbian and queer discourses and identities; commercial sex; and HIV/AIDS. This book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars both of modern China and of sex and sexualities, who wish to understand the role that sex plays in contemporary China.