A variety of Chinese writings from the Song period (960-1279)-medical texts, religious treatises, fiction, and anecdotes-depict women who were considered peculiar because their sexual bodies did not belong to men. These were women who refused to marry, were considered unmarriageable, or were married but denied their husbands sexual access, thereby removing themselves from social constructs of female sexuality defined in relation to men. As elite male authors attempted to make sense of these women whose sexual bodies were unavailable to them, they were forced to contemplate the purpose of women's bodies and lives apart from wifehood and motherhood. This raised troubling new questions about normalcy, desire, sexuality, and identity.
In Divine, Demonic, and Disordered, Hsiao-wen Cheng considers accounts of "manless women," many of which depict women who suffered from "enchantment disorder" or who engaged in "intercourse with ghosts"-conditions with specific symptoms and behavioral patterns. Cheng questions conventional binary gender analyses and shifts attention away from women's reproductive bodies and familial roles. Her innovative study offers historians of China and readers interested in women, gender, sexuality, medicine, and religion a fresh look at the unstable meanings attached to women's behaviors and lives even in a time of codified patriarchy.
About the Author :
Hsiao-wen Cheng is associate professor of East Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.
Review :
"This important book advances our understanding of issues of women and gender in premodern and especially Song-dynasty (960-1279) China."
"Cheng's focus on medieval China makes an important contribution broadly to the study of women, gender, and sexuality from an unprecedented angle."
"Offers the reader an invaluable and rare insight."
"This book is crucial for people interested in gender, religion, and medicine; how these topics developed during the Song dynasty or medieval China; and how all three became intertwined and evoked debates in the modern world. Teachers will find the translated anecdotes useful for undergraduates to interpret and discuss in courses on premodern Chinese history and literature."
"An important contribution to histories of gender, sexuality, medicine, and religion. . . . In addition, the book includes the translation of plentiful marvelous stories and strange tales, a bonus for readers interested in Chinese literature."
"[Cheng] demonstrates the powerful potential of how reading creatively can reveal new ways of understanding history without stretching the source material beyond what it can conceivably tell us about those on history's margins."
"Cheng brings together texts that have rarely been read in conversation with each other and shows how they resonate in surprising, compelling ways. She demonstrates the powerful potential of how reading creatively can reveal new ways of understanding history without stretching the source material beyond what it can conceivably tell us about those on history’s margins."
