Chinese women, gender, and sexuality: A critical review of recent studies

Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 31-47

  Jankowiak, William ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GENDER DISPARITY; GENDER ISSUE;

CHINA;

EID: 0032803221     PISSN: 00074810     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14672715.1999.10415728     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Gail Hershatter, "Modernizing Sex: Sexing and Reproduction in Traditional Chinese Medicine," in Engendering China, ed. Christina Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1994) and Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasure: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
2. Gail Hershatter, "Modernizing Sex: Sexing and Reproduction in Traditional Chinese Medicine," in Engendering China, ed. Christina Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1994) and Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasure: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
3. Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China (London: Hurst and Co., 1995), p. 18.
4. Ibid., p. 127.
5. Gilmartin et al., Engendering China. Some notable exceptions to this bias are Keith McMahon, who focuses on love, Cathy Siber and Susan Mann, who explore in separate chapters the emotional intimacy of female friendship and solidarity, and Gao Xiaoxian, who, unlike most of her colleagues in the United States, focuses on the heterosexual relationship. Rubie Watson, in a separate work, also explores the role of sentimentality as it affected women's loyalty within a unilineal kinship system. See Rubie Watson, Inequality among Brothers: Class and Kinship in South China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
6. Gilmartin et al., Engendering China. Some notable exceptions to this bias are Keith McMahon, who focuses on love, Cathy Siber and Susan Mann, who explore in separate chapters the emotional intimacy of female friendship and solidarity, and Gao Xiaoxian, who, unlike most of her colleagues in the United States, focuses on the heterosexual relationship. Rubie Watson, in a separate work, also explores the role of sentimentality as it affected women's loyalty within a unilineal kinship system. See Rubie Watson, Inequality among Brothers: Class and Kinship in South China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
7. Lu Tonglin, ed., Gender and Sexuality (Albany: State University of New York, 1993).
8. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, eds., Women and Chinese Patriarchy (London: Zed Books, 1994).
9. Ibid., p. 16.
10. Margery Wolf, "Women and Suicide in China," in Women in Chinese Society, ed. Margery Wolf and Roxanne Witke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975).
11. James L. Watson, "Self-Defense Corps, Violence and the Bachelor Sub-culture in South China: Two Case Studies," in Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Sinology (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1989), p. 215.
12. Angela Zito and Tani Barlow, eds., Body, Subject and Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
13. Tani Barlow, ed., Gender Politics in Modern China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).
14. Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
15. Ellen Judd, Gender and Power in Rural North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
16. Ibid., p. 8.
17. Ibid., p. 254.
18. Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton, eds., Sexual Nature, Sexual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. xii.
19. Ibid., p. 268.
20. Alice Rossi, "Eros and Caritas: A Biopsychological Approach to Human Sexuality and Reproduction," in Sexuality across the Life Course (Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 3-33.
21. See Liu Dalin, Man Lun Ng, Li Pingzhou, and Erwin Haeberle, Sexual Behavior in Modern China (New York: Continuum, 1997).
22. Gilmartin et al., Engendering China, and Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity.
23. There is general agreement that sex is much more than the exchange of bodily fluids. It also has a cultural and biological context. For one thing sex is an intensely private affair. It is a human's most invisible activity, which makes it most difficult to observe and validate. See Ernestine Friedl, "Sex the Invisible," American Anthropologist 96, no. 4 (1996): 833-44. There are several responses to the dilemma of attempting to study something so intensely private. One method is to observe those occasions when the activity is a semi-public ritual. Another is the use of pornographic writings, drawings, and movies. The third method is to interview people about their sexual behavior. All three approaches have their methodological difficulties. Because it is the prevalent conventional wisdom that a culture's discourse on sexuality is the byproduct of the interplay between its cosmology and social structure, most researchers prefer to examine the relationship between macro-forces, its social structure, and the formation of sexual ideology.
24. Charlotte Furth, "Rethinking Van Gulik: Sexuality and Reproduction in Traditional Chinese Medicine," in Gilmartin et al., Engendering China.
25. Ibid., p. 135.
26. Ibid.
27. For me, cross-cultural research offers a different explanation - one that has less to do with issues of power and control than it does with concerns of erotic aesthetics.
28. See Kam Louie and Louise Edwards, "Chinese Masculinity: Theorizing Wen and Wu," East Asian History 8 (1994):135-48. This historical article by Kam and Edwards on masculine meanings in Imperial China is representative of an emerging trend in historical studies of Chinese society that focus on men's perceptions. Like the feminist studies, these studies focus only on men and do not discuss their relationships with women as either brothers, sons, husbands, or lovers. In effect, gender is not studied as an interactive or complementary phenomenon.
29. Michael Brown, "On Resisting Resistance," American Anthropologist 98, no. 4 (1996): 729-49 (quote appears on p. 34).
30. Munro Edmunson, cited in ibid., p. 734
31. Lu, Gender and Sexuality.
32. Ibid.; Barlow, Gender Politics.
33. Ibid.; Barlow, Gender Politics.
34. Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity.
35. Ibid., p. 14.
36. Arthur Wolf, Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese Brief for Edward Westermarck (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); Liu et al., Sexual Behavior.
37. Arthur Wolf, Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese Brief for Edward Westermarck (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); Liu et al., Sexual Behavior.
38. Arthur Wolf, Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese Brief for Edward Westermarck (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); Liu et al., Sexual Behavior.
39. Wolf, Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association, p. 37.
40. Ibid., p. 373.
41. Ibid., p. ix.
42. Liu et al., Sexual Behavior.
43. Ibid.; Fang Ruruan, Sex in China (New York: Plenum Press: N.Y: 1991).
44. Ibid.; Fang Ruruan, Sex in China (New York: Plenum Press: N.Y: 1991).
45. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
46. Charles Lindholm, The Muslim Middle East: An Historical Anthropology (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1997).
47. Susan Brownell and Jeffery Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University California Press, forthcoming); Robert Moore, "Love and Infatuation with Chinese Characteristics: Student Romance in the PRC," in Romantic Love and Sexual Behavior: Perspective from the Social Sciences, ed. Victor DeMunck (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998); Sulamith Potter and Jack Potter, China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Yuxing Yan, The Flow of Gifts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); William Jankowiak, Sex, Death and Hierarchy in a Chinese City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
48. Susan Brownell and Jeffery Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University California Press, forthcoming); Robert Moore, "Love and Infatuation with Chinese Characteristics: Student Romance in the PRC," in Romantic Love and Sexual Behavior: Perspective from the Social Sciences, ed. Victor DeMunck (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998); Sulamith Potter and Jack Potter, China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Yuxing Yan, The Flow of Gifts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); William Jankowiak, Sex, Death and Hierarchy in a Chinese City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
49. Susan Brownell and Jeffery Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University California Press, forthcoming); Robert Moore, "Love and Infatuation with Chinese Characteristics: Student Romance in the PRC," in Romantic Love and Sexual Behavior: Perspective from the Social Sciences, ed. Victor DeMunck (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998); Sulamith Potter and Jack Potter, China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Yuxing Yan, The Flow of Gifts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); William Jankowiak, Sex, Death and Hierarchy in a Chinese City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
50. Susan Brownell and Jeffery Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University California Press, forthcoming); Robert Moore, "Love and Infatuation with Chinese Characteristics: Student Romance in the PRC," in Romantic Love and Sexual Behavior: Perspective from the Social Sciences, ed. Victor DeMunck (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998); Sulamith Potter and Jack Potter, China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Yuxing Yan, The Flow of Gifts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); William Jankowiak, Sex, Death and Hierarchy in a Chinese City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
51. Susan Brownell and Jeffery Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University California Press, forthcoming); Robert Moore, "Love and Infatuation with Chinese Characteristics: Student Romance in the PRC," in Romantic Love and Sexual Behavior: Perspective from the Social Sciences, ed. Victor DeMunck (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998); Sulamith Potter and Jack Potter, China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Yuxing Yan, The Flow of Gifts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); William Jankowiak, Sex, Death and Hierarchy in a Chinese City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
52. I would like to thank Susan Brownell for calling this to my attention.
53. I suspect this will not occur as long as meaning-centered studies are preferred over causal-centered analysis.
54. Yan, The Flow of Gifts; Moore, "Love and Infatuation"; Patricia Ebrey, Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers.
55. Yan, The Flow of Gifts; Moore, "Love and Infatuation"; Patricia Ebrey, Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers.
56. Yan, The Flow of Gifts; Moore, "Love and Infatuation"; Patricia Ebrey, Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers.
57. Yan, The Flow of Gifts; Moore, "Love and Infatuation"; Patricia Ebrey, Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994); Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers.