On May 16-17 FSI will be co-sponsoring a conference with the Department of History and the Center for East Asian Studies on Same-Sex Desire and Union in China: Interdisciplinary and Historical Perspectives.

OVERVIEW

Same-sex desire and union are themes of basic importance to multiple fields of Chinese studies, notably Ming-Qing literature, but also history, anthropology, and contemporary cultural and political studies. After long occlusion by mainstream scholarship, these themes have recently become a central focus for a growing number of international scholars. In a complementary development, queer activism and cultural production are highly visible features of the increasingly robust civil societies that have emerged in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, and Hong Kong over the past decade or two. The following is a brief overview of just a few of the questions and challenges that scholars face today.

A rich body of homoerotic literature survives from Late Imperial China (especially the 17th-19th centuries), but much of this material has been neglected until very recently (in part because censorship by successive political regimes made once famous works obscure and hard to find). Indeed, a prominent part of elite male discourse and lifestyle was a homoerotic sensibility that focused in part on cross-dressing boy actors as objects of aesthetic idealization and sexual desire. By the eighteenth century, as commercial opera in Beijing achieved its mature form, to consort with boy actors had become a fashionable (if controversial) status symbol for elite men, and a high-class homosexual brothel/escort scene flourished in close connection with the theater. This world is richly documented in the drama, vernacular fiction, and literati jottings of the era, and it is now a rising priority for literary scholars and historians. But we have barely scratched the surface of this material, and mainstream scholarship has hardly begun to take account of its implications. A handful of scholars have also begun to explore drama and verse written by women, which contain many homoerotic themes; but this exciting body of texts remains largely unknown to the wider field of Chinese literature.

During the same era, a skewed sex ratio and shortage of wives among the poor meant that increasing numbers of marginalized males lived outside the normative family system. In that context, same-sex union (often framed by chosen kinship forms such as ganqin adoption or sworn brotherhood) was the dominant mode of alliance, although there is also evidence of widespread wife-sharing and other non-normative family forms. Although organized according to age hierarchy, such same-sex unions appear to have been far more symmetrical and consensual than anything found in the elite homoerotic scene. Judicial anxiety focused on the security threat supposedly posed by this growing underclass of marginal males, who were stereotyped as sexual predators threatening the women and adolescent boys of established families; legal prohibitions of male-male sodomy (fully developed in the eighteenth century) focused on suppressing this threat. As a result of these prohibitions, China’s vast legal archives from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contain masses of evidence about male same-sex relations that scholars have only just begun to investigate.

At the same time, there is considerable evidence in legal sources that male same-sex relations were also widespread within settled peasant communities. A common – if seldom openly acknowledged – pattern was for a young male, in the years leading up to marriage, to play the penetrated role in a sexual relationship with an older man. The penetrated role was stigmatized, but it was also understandable and largely tolerated as a stage of the maturation process on the path to full social adulthood, which came with marriage. This way of understanding and experiencing same-sex relations has much in common with practice in other premodern societies, but it seems radically different from the modern egalitarian template of sexual orientation.

The fall of the empire in 1912 ushered in a new era in which anxious elites promoted a Westernized vision of modernity in order to resist and catch up with the developed imperialist powers. A notable feature of this vision was a re-imagination of same-sex desire in terms of the newly imported concept of “homosexuality,” which implied pathology. This modernity involved the active suppression of longstanding forms of elite self-expression (for example, patronage of cross-dressing actors), but also the emergence of new images and self-conscious identities (for example, the concept of the lesbian as a social figure). Something similar happened in Japan and many other parts of the world during roughly the same era. This transformational process continues in China to this day; questions of identity and social role, in particular, remain open and fluid. A key issue now, in our era of accelerated globalization, is the ways in which imported concepts and vocabulary will articulate with locally emerging forms of identity, politics, and cultural expression.

The contemporary queer scene in “Greater China” (including the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) serves as a revealing barometer of wider political and social change. In Taiwan since the end of martial law (1987), queer politics and culture have become among the most striking and visible dimensions of a new democratic society. In a less open but no less dramatic way, the PRC in the post-Mao era (since 1978) has also witnessed an efflorescence of queer associations, social life, and cultural production. In cities like Beijing, such activity takes place within a broad, ambiguous grey area that enjoys no legal protection, but in practice is often tolerated by authorities. The underground film scene is especially lively. In both Taiwan and the PRC, queer life is a prominent feature of the fledgling civil societies that have emerged with the demise of more repressive political regimes.

The contemporary Chinese queer scene is characterized by a vital transnational cross-fertilization that takes in Western countries and overseas Chinese as well – for example, some of the key activists in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the PRC have spent long stints in North America, Australia, or Europe for education or work, and in that setting have been able to network with Western activists and scholars, and with other Chinese living abroad. By the same token, the study of homosexuality in Chinese history and culture (like the broader field of Chinese studies) has become an increasingly transnational enterprise, involving scholars in all parts of Greater China, together with North Americans, Australians, and Europeans, as well as Chinese expatriates who teach on foreign campuses.

The purpose of this two-day conference is to bring people together for a conversation across boundaries of discipline, period, and geography. Scholars in separate fields (and locations) have conducted enough work by now that we are reaching something like a critical mass. But so far, most of us have focused on our own narrow disciplines and topics of research – and at this point, we would all benefit from cross-fertilization and synthesis. What bigger picture emerges when we cast our separate findings in historical and interdisciplinary light? How do historical and comparative perspectives help to illuminate contemporary developments?

The conference will consist of five panels of speakers (three per panel), followed by a round table discussion among four prominent scholars (two historians and two literature specialists) from outside the field of Chinese studies, to highlight comparative and theoretical issues that have emerged from the conference papers. If, as I expect, the event is a success, I hope to edit a conference volume for publication.

The conference is free and open to the public.