Sex & Gender in China
Posted: Thu Nov 25, 2004 10:51 am
Below is a brief item that I discovered yesterday during my reading. While its definitely written in Academic, I think that some of the Archive members will find it interesting. It certainly helps to answer some of the questions that I have had about Chinese culture. I thought that I knew the answers, but this adds important dimensions. I especially found interesting the notion that, the castration of a eunuch was not primarily perceived as an injury to the manhood of the eunuch but rather as an injury to the father who had created him.
The Primacy of Gender over Sex in Chinese Traditions
The Western tendency to take male/female as a fundamental, immutable opposition may lead scholars to assume that the female/male distinction is the central organizing principle in all symbolic systems, but this has not always been the case in China. In separate works, Ann Anagnost and Susan Brownell observe that, in Chinese gender symbolism, sex-linked symbols are often secondary to other, more fundamental principles of moral and social life.[1] This is because the structure of sex-linked symbolism mirrors the social structure, in which gender is situated within a broader network of social relations that take precedence over the dyadic sexual relation.
To take a concrete example, traditional Chinese cosmology is a symbolic system in which sex is constructed by gender, not the other way around. Westerners typically misunderstand the yin/yang dichotomy, assuming that yin means female and yang means male. In fact, yin and yang originally connoted shade and light but later had no fixed meanings. They were a way of describing relationships between things. In Taoist cosmology, for example, yin was identified with the natural and the female principles that were more highly valued than were yang, culture and maleness. By contrast, as they were used in Confucian orthodoxy yin and yang referred to hierarchical human relationships, and the power relationship between yin and yang qualities was reversed. A wife was seen as inferior to her husband, as yin was to yang. Interestingly, a subject or government minister, however, was also seen as yin in relation to the yang of a ruler, and this was true even if both people in this dyadic relationship were male. Yin and yang expressed complementary, hierarchical relationships that were not necessarily between males and females, even though yang was typically associated with masculine and yin with feminine principles. Rather than being an irreducible polarity in traditional Chinese cosmology, sex was one concept caught up in a network of other, perhaps more basic, concepts.[2] This was because sex was simply one principle among many (e.g., kinship, generation, age, and class) that determined a persons position in the family and in society.
Because the notion of the primacy of social role over anatomical sex may seem counterintuitive to many readers, it may be useful to illustrate it with the example of Chinese eunuchs . As something of a third gender which is hard to place cleanly on either side of an imagined immutable male-female divide, a discussion of eunuchs can provide insights into dominant gender constructs. Considering how useful the status of eunuchs is for understanding aspects of the pre-nineteenth-century gender system, it is disappointing that almost no studies of eunuchs have been done from a gender-studies perspective. Instead, extant studies tend to focus narrowly on eunuchs role in court politics, in which, it has been observed, they made up a curious third administrative hierarchy that was separate from the main civil and military ones of imperial times.[3]
In one of the few analyses of the gender of eunuchs, Jennifer Jay concludes that they underwent no gender shift but remained unquestionably male.[4] Jay notes that they were referred to as males in formal address and kinship terminology, wore male attire, married, adopted children, and ran their households. Their sexuality, she argues, remained heterosexual in orientation. Her argument is complicated, however, by evidence that eunuchs were socially ostracized and denied proper Confucian burials because their castration was seen as unfilial. Many eunuchs went to great lengths to keep their male organs so that their bodies gifts from their parents that they had damaged in life could be buried and their wholeness (and with it their filial piety) restored in death. In addition , a eunuch could legally be taken as a concubine while a true man could not.
The efforts of eunuchs to define themselves as social males can be regarded as strategic manipulations of gender symbols, an attempt to claim power in a patriarchal world. Their behavior illustrates the main symbols of proper masculinity: marriage, children, and household headship; occupation of male categories in the kinship system; and male clothing. On the other hand, the fact that in some ways there were still not regarded as true males shows that masculinity was defined not just socially but also biologically: the possession of a male organ and the ability to produce ones own offspring with it were also important aspects of manhood. However, the point is that, unlike in the modern West, the possession of a penis was not primarily important because of male sexual pleasure, but rather because of what it represented. And it represented the patriarchal power that had been passed down the patriline from father to son according to the rules of Confucian filial piety. The castration of a eunuch was not primarily perceived as an injury to the manhood of the eunuch but rather as an injury to the father who had created him.
__________
FOOTNOTES:
1. Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the Peoples Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 219 22; Ann Anagnost, Transformations of Gender in Modern China, in Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching, ed. Sandra Morgen (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1989), 313 42 (see p. 321).
2. See Alison H. Black, Gender and cosmology in Chinese Correlative Thinking, in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon, 1986), 166 95.
3. Taisuke Mitamura does briefly state that eunuchs were considered deficient men who were neither masculine nor feminine, but he does not carry out a systematic examination of gender ideology. Taisuke Mitamura, Chinese Eunuchs: The Structure of Intimate Politics (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1970). In Shih-san Henry Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), the question of where eunuchs fit into Chinas gender systems also receives relatively little attention. The term third administrative hierarchy is taken from that work.
4. Jennifer W. Jay, Another Side of Chinese Eunuch History: Castration, Marriage, Adoption, and Burial, Canadian Journal of History 28, no. 3 (December 1993): 460 78.
FROM: Susan Brownell & Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, eds. Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 26 27.
The Primacy of Gender over Sex in Chinese Traditions
The Western tendency to take male/female as a fundamental, immutable opposition may lead scholars to assume that the female/male distinction is the central organizing principle in all symbolic systems, but this has not always been the case in China. In separate works, Ann Anagnost and Susan Brownell observe that, in Chinese gender symbolism, sex-linked symbols are often secondary to other, more fundamental principles of moral and social life.[1] This is because the structure of sex-linked symbolism mirrors the social structure, in which gender is situated within a broader network of social relations that take precedence over the dyadic sexual relation.
To take a concrete example, traditional Chinese cosmology is a symbolic system in which sex is constructed by gender, not the other way around. Westerners typically misunderstand the yin/yang dichotomy, assuming that yin means female and yang means male. In fact, yin and yang originally connoted shade and light but later had no fixed meanings. They were a way of describing relationships between things. In Taoist cosmology, for example, yin was identified with the natural and the female principles that were more highly valued than were yang, culture and maleness. By contrast, as they were used in Confucian orthodoxy yin and yang referred to hierarchical human relationships, and the power relationship between yin and yang qualities was reversed. A wife was seen as inferior to her husband, as yin was to yang. Interestingly, a subject or government minister, however, was also seen as yin in relation to the yang of a ruler, and this was true even if both people in this dyadic relationship were male. Yin and yang expressed complementary, hierarchical relationships that were not necessarily between males and females, even though yang was typically associated with masculine and yin with feminine principles. Rather than being an irreducible polarity in traditional Chinese cosmology, sex was one concept caught up in a network of other, perhaps more basic, concepts.[2] This was because sex was simply one principle among many (e.g., kinship, generation, age, and class) that determined a persons position in the family and in society.
Because the notion of the primacy of social role over anatomical sex may seem counterintuitive to many readers, it may be useful to illustrate it with the example of Chinese eunuchs . As something of a third gender which is hard to place cleanly on either side of an imagined immutable male-female divide, a discussion of eunuchs can provide insights into dominant gender constructs. Considering how useful the status of eunuchs is for understanding aspects of the pre-nineteenth-century gender system, it is disappointing that almost no studies of eunuchs have been done from a gender-studies perspective. Instead, extant studies tend to focus narrowly on eunuchs role in court politics, in which, it has been observed, they made up a curious third administrative hierarchy that was separate from the main civil and military ones of imperial times.[3]
In one of the few analyses of the gender of eunuchs, Jennifer Jay concludes that they underwent no gender shift but remained unquestionably male.[4] Jay notes that they were referred to as males in formal address and kinship terminology, wore male attire, married, adopted children, and ran their households. Their sexuality, she argues, remained heterosexual in orientation. Her argument is complicated, however, by evidence that eunuchs were socially ostracized and denied proper Confucian burials because their castration was seen as unfilial. Many eunuchs went to great lengths to keep their male organs so that their bodies gifts from their parents that they had damaged in life could be buried and their wholeness (and with it their filial piety) restored in death. In addition , a eunuch could legally be taken as a concubine while a true man could not.
The efforts of eunuchs to define themselves as social males can be regarded as strategic manipulations of gender symbols, an attempt to claim power in a patriarchal world. Their behavior illustrates the main symbols of proper masculinity: marriage, children, and household headship; occupation of male categories in the kinship system; and male clothing. On the other hand, the fact that in some ways there were still not regarded as true males shows that masculinity was defined not just socially but also biologically: the possession of a male organ and the ability to produce ones own offspring with it were also important aspects of manhood. However, the point is that, unlike in the modern West, the possession of a penis was not primarily important because of male sexual pleasure, but rather because of what it represented. And it represented the patriarchal power that had been passed down the patriline from father to son according to the rules of Confucian filial piety. The castration of a eunuch was not primarily perceived as an injury to the manhood of the eunuch but rather as an injury to the father who had created him.
__________
FOOTNOTES:
1. Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the Peoples Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 219 22; Ann Anagnost, Transformations of Gender in Modern China, in Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching, ed. Sandra Morgen (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1989), 313 42 (see p. 321).
2. See Alison H. Black, Gender and cosmology in Chinese Correlative Thinking, in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon, 1986), 166 95.
3. Taisuke Mitamura does briefly state that eunuchs were considered deficient men who were neither masculine nor feminine, but he does not carry out a systematic examination of gender ideology. Taisuke Mitamura, Chinese Eunuchs: The Structure of Intimate Politics (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1970). In Shih-san Henry Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), the question of where eunuchs fit into Chinas gender systems also receives relatively little attention. The term third administrative hierarchy is taken from that work.
4. Jennifer W. Jay, Another Side of Chinese Eunuch History: Castration, Marriage, Adoption, and Burial, Canadian Journal of History 28, no. 3 (December 1993): 460 78.
FROM: Susan Brownell & Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, eds. Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 26 27.