After Eunuchs

Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China

Howard Chiang

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231546331
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

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.

Index

Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate location in the e-book.

518 Hospital, 239, 242, 245, 250

A’nidu, 218–20

Acces, Alice Henriette, 205–6

Adanson, Michel, 11

Albinus, Bernhard, 82

Altman, Dennis, 132

anatomy, 1, 4, 10, 90, 105, 108, 116, 119, 128, 173, 174, 178, 179, 199, 200; anatomical aesthetic, 72–86, 88, 97, 100, 101, 104, 111–12, 113, 121, 283, 299n7; anatomical drawings or illustrations, 72, 79–82, 86, 93, 97, 98–99, 100, 101, 103, 107, 123–24, 134, 283, 300n30; anatomical text, 71, 74–75, 198, 302n.79; Anatomy Law of 1913, 97; and castration, 27, 31, 32, 40, 50, 54; reproductive, 3, 75–78, 82, 84, 95, 97, 100, 102, 109, 144, 147, 161, 301n41; style of reasoning, 134; of Xie Jianshun, 243, 247, 248, 260; of Yao Jinping, 219. See also dissection

animal sex change, 5, 27–28, 178–79, 183–88, 193, 195, 197, 204, 208, 227, 284

archive, 3, 20–22, 39, 45, 57, 68, 125, 136, 143, 160, 239, 278, 294n27; Qing palace, 29, 48–49, 58

Arondekar, Anjali, 21

Art Life (Meishu shenghuo), 208

Articles of Favorable Treatment of the Emperor of Great Qing After His Abdication, 63

asylum, 3, 71, 290n17, 299n6. See also psychiatry

Bachelard, Gaston, 13

Backhouse, Edmund, 36–39

Baldwin, E. M., 188

banlu chujia, 55

bao...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Toward a Genealogy of Sex
• I. China Castrated
• II. Vital Visions
• III. Deciphering Desire
• IV. Mercurial Matter
• V. Transsexual Taiwan
• Conclusion: China Trans Formed
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index