Gender in Modern East Asia

Barbara Molony

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429973444
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Politics & International Relations
• Sous-sujet: Asian Politics

Gender in Modern East Asia explores the history of women and gender in China, Korea, and Japan from the seventeenth century to the present. This unique volume treats the three countries separately within each time period while also placing them in global and regional contexts. Its transnational and integrated approach connects the cultural, economic, and social developments in East Asia to what is happening across the wider world.

The text focuses specifically on the dynamic histories of sexuality; gender ideology, discourse, and legal construction; marriage and the family; and the gendering of work, society, culture, and power. Important themes and topics woven through the text include Confucianism, writing and language, the role of the state in gender construction, nationalism, sexuality and prostitution, New Women and Modern Girls, feminisms, "comfort" women, and imperialism. Accessibly written and comprehensive, Gender in Modern East Asia is a much-needed contribution to the study of the region.

1

Gender in Ancient and Medieval East Asia Before 1600

GLOBAL CONTEXT

Gender and sexuality in East Asian societies, as elsewhere throughout the world, have varied over time and among societies. They have been framed in the varying historical contexts of secular and religious ideas, the evolution of economic activities, bureaucratization and governance, the increasing complexities of social life, and war and peace. The mobility of people and cultures has meant that no society has been so isolated from others that it developed unique and unchanging ways of defining gender and sexuality.

The movement of ideas and people before 1600 was much livelier and more deliberate between neighboring societies than between distant societies. So it is no surprise that what are now the modern nations of China, Korea, and Japan, all located in Northeast Asia, can be seen as an integrated region because of the flow of cultures and people over time. Until the nineteenth century, the movement of ideas, cultures, and religions tended to be from west to east—from China to Korea to Japan—while trade and human migration were more multidirectional. One of the key mediators that facilitated such movement was the Chinese writing system. From late antiquity on, the Chinese writing system came to be used by the elites and ruling classes in all three areas. As a result, it was seen until the late nineteenth century as a “truth language,” much as Latin was in Western Europe before the rise of vernacular writing in the Renaissance. This allowed Chinese ideas, including gender norms, to be influential throughout the region for hundreds of years. But it would be a mistake to assume that intraregional mobility of ideas and people erased all local differences in the construction of gender and the performance of sexuality. Each society had its own history and thus its own historically inflected notions of gender.

People in modern societies generally think of sex (male/female) and gender (masculine/feminine) as binary, that is, as being divided into two categories. Recently this binary divide has been challenged by the increasingly accepted view that both sex and gender exist on a continuum, without a rigid division into just two categories. To be sure, the concept of gender as a way of categorizing people is itself fairly recent. Less than thirty years ago, it was typical to divide society into two immutable sexes, rather than into genders that were historically and socially constructed and, therefore, open to reconstruction. Although societies’ laws and customs were created in the past as if sex was an unchanging characteristic with which people were born, the notion that gender was constructed has been much more consistent with historians’ view that things change over time. It was a tremendous scholarly breakthrough to add women and gender to the study of history, so viewing gender as a “useful category of historical analysis” was revolutionary (Scott 1986). Scholars will not go back to the days of ignoring sex and gender. For that reason, we need to find the origins and development of these categories.

Sex and gender have not always been more important social and legal categories than other ways of classifying people. Marital status, family or clan membership, social class (especially the relationship to the ruling class), occupation, caste, and other categories were at times more important. Unlike gender, sexual practice has long been acknowledged as taking many different forms, although the concept of sexual identity (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) and its linkage with one’s choice of sexual partners has a much more recent history. Sexuality includes not just sexual practice but also intimate relations, family formation, commodification (sale) of sex, marriage rituals, and reproduction, all of which must be considered in their historical contexts.

When and why did gender become so central to social organization?

One way to look at the development of gender in societies is economic. Prehistoric people needed food, shelter, and protection from predators, and formed small communities to deliver those necessities. Some members hunted animals, some gathered plants to eat. These roles were not initially gendered, but over time, in many places, it became more likely for men to hunt and women to gather. So gender could be defined by labor choices, a pattern that became increasingly important as societies and economies developed. Gender hierarchy was not evident in most hunter-gatherer societies. With the advent of agricultural development, however, gender dynamics began to shift toward more male-dominant structures and practices.

Later, gender was also defined by religion, including belief in the supernatural. As societies came to see themselves as entities distinct from neighboring groups, many created myths to explain where they came from. In most of these creation stories, nonhumans or gods interacted with humans, and those humans or their descendants went on to found one’s country or civilization. In all of these cases, some sort of familial relationship played a part: Adam and Eve in the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Greek and Roman gods’ sexual bonding with humans, the foundation of Old Chosŏn (Korea) by a descendant of the son of the Heavenly King and a woman transformed from a bear, the founding of Japan by descendants of the sun goddess Amaterasu, the large variety of Native American creation stories, and so on. The family and family relationships were thus at the center of the ways most human societies explained their origins as organized communities or states. In many cases, both men and women played significant roles in these myths. Later, more structured religions created rituals, doctrines, and belief systems, and many of these came to define men and women as different and often unequal.

Religion-based inequality often paralleled social inequality, but which came first is not clear. In any case, a civilization’s level of complexity seems to have played a part in creating gender differences. The more complex a society was—with planned cities, bureaucracies, organized government, and culture—the more likely it was that people’s status was classified by their sex (that is, male and female). In some cases, constructed notions of gender placed individuals in the classes of empowered and disempowered. But similar stages of social complexity did not always lead to similar levels of equality. Four thousand years ago, in ancient West Asia (Mesopotamia, Israel, and other civilizations), men and women did not have equal legal status. Around the same time, in ancient Egypt, sex did not define legal status; rather, whether one was free or a slave was more important.

In increasingly sophisticated civilizations, religion and philosophy came to create more specifically defined binary sex/gender divisions. These divisions were, in turn, used to create governments that were based on sex/ gender differences. Athens’s “democracy” was crafted by Solon, known as “the lawgiver,” in the sixth century BCE as a way to arrange the disorganized Greek matrimonial system of his day in a patriarchal (male-dominated) manner. This created a government by free men only, so stipulating who was male and who was female was necessary. The esteemed Athenian philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) claimed that men were intellectually and physically superior to women; perfecting masculinity was the basis of democracy. In fact, as the historian Thucydides (c. 460–c. 395 BCE) noted, the good woman was the one who was “least talked about among the men, whether for good or for bad” (quoted in Halsall 2004, 290). In Rome a few hundred years later, patriarchal dominance was embedded in the rule that fathers had complete control over their families. Medieval European Christianity also gendered society and placed men over women. But all of these societies were characterized by slavery and serfdom as well, so there were multiple forms of inequality. Religion and philosophy played a significant role in constructing gender and other inequalities in East Asia in antiquity and the medieval era too, as we shall see in this chapter.

Sexuality has varied over time and place. Ancient and medieval governments tended to care little about one’s sex partners (and often valued same-sex relations, as in ancient Greece), but they did care about marriage. Marriage was linked to power and to inheritance, and messing with marriage could disrupt society. Formal marriage rituals and divorce procedures were developed. Some focused on matrilocal residence and inheritance (as in Korea and Japan in antiquity and the early medieval era), but many stressed the dominance of the husband’s family in residence and inheritance (as in China). Some marriages involved more than two people. In some areas of Tibet, one bride could have several husbands, while under Islam, a man could marry up to four wives if he could care for them all equally. The Catholic Church claimed the right to regulate marriages of the elite and of clergy in the fourth century CE (Catholic clergy could marry until the eleventh century) and began to regulate commoners’ marriages in the thirteenth century. In Southern and Eastern Europe from 1000 to 1500 CE, grooms tended to be much older than their brides, and the couple often lived with one set of parents until she matured. Northern European couples at that time usually married when both partners were much older, setting up their own households right away. In some societies religious rites were required; in others all that was required was an exchange of wine cups or a contract written by a hired scribe. In some West African areas, marriages were gendered, but female “husbands” could marry female “wives.” Marriages took many different forms throughout the ancient and medieval world. As this chapter will show, these forms, which were linked to notions of gender, varied throughout East Asia as well.

China

Dynasties in China

Zhou (c. 1000–256 BCE)

Qin–Han (221 BCE–220 CE)

Sui–Tang (581–907)

Song (960–1279)

Yuan (1260–1368)

Ming (1368–1644)

Qing (1644–1911)

The earliest evidence of gender systems in East Asia comes from the territory of what is today China. Increasingly rich archaeological evidence from Neolithic cultures (c. 5000–1766 BCE) depicts the fragmented emergence of complex societies in different regions demonstrating striking variety in material culture. Yet despite this regional diversity, Neolithic cultures appear to have shared key elements of later Chinese gender order: the linkage of status to kinship roles, the great significance of mortuary rituals in expressing kinship relations, the lower status of women compared to men of the same rank, and the large difference in gender roles of elites and non-elites. In excavated burials there are many fewer women than men, women are commonly buried with fewer grave goods, and there are gender distinctions in body positioning and grave goods assemblages, with women getting spindle whorls and domestic items and men getting weapons and ritual items. There is some mortuary evidence of women being buried with their natal families, which suggests that while gender hierarchies and divisions of labor were well established, patrilineal patterns of family organization may not have been universal (Linduff and Sun 2004).

The clear dominance of patrilineal principles accompanied the development of state structures in the Yellow River valley of the north in the Shang period (c. 1766–1045 BCE). The Shang royal ancestral cult focused on the male line of succession and made the king’s family matters essential affairs of state. Ideas about gender difference and patrilineal descent were integral to expressions of state power and legitimacy. The earliest extant Chinese texts were oracle bones used by the Shang rulers for divination rituals querying royal ancestors about important matters. They depict the royal consorts of the polygynous Shang kings engaging in ritual sacrifices and military affairs, show the importance placed on their health, childbirths, and dreams, and indicate that sacrifices were made to honor them as ancestors in dedicated temples.

The royal consort Fu Hao (c. 1250 BCE) led armies of more than ten thousand troops in battle and was honored in death with one of the most sumptuous Shang tombs yet discovered, including hundreds of elaborate bronze vessels, weapons, and ritual objects, hundreds of objects in jade, bone, stone, and shell, and sixteen human sacrifice victims including men, women, and children. Yet Fu Hao’s exceptional power and wealth, like those of the other documented consorts, derived from her marriage to the king, and she was clearly subordinate to him. The oracle bone texts show that the Shang ancestor cult focused more on men than on women: fewer women were venerated (and then only if they had borne sons for the king), women received fewer rituals than men, and women had smaller tombs (Linduff and Sun 2004).

The Emergence of a Confucian Gender Orthodoxy

The Shang were conquered and succeeded by a rival polity, the Zhou (1045–221 BCE), whose rulers extended their power by bestowing titles on loyal nobles who then acknowledged their ongoing fealty through elaborate rituals. Strategic marriages between the Zhou royal family and noble lineages and among nobles were a key mechanism for securing political alliances. In a context where political relations were highly ritualized and intertwined with kinship bonds, the first codification of norms of gender and family hierarchy took the form of ritual rules (li) governing behavior. To understand gender roles, the most salient of these codifications is the Li Ji (Book of Rites), compiled in its current version in the Han period (206 BCE–220 CE), based on content developed in the Zhou period. Reflecting the fact that the Zhou political system was based on kinship relations, this text articulated the paradigm of the family as an analogy for the state and presented prescriptions for the conduct of family and state affairs that were the foundation for the ethical system promoted by Confucius (c. 551–479 BCE) and his followers. By the third century BCE, the lineage system of the Zhou was being replaced by state bureaucracies staffed by officials who were not related to the ruler by blood or marriage. As the Qin (221–206 BCE) and Han (206 BCE–220 CE) dynasties unified China under a centralized bureaucratic state, they promoted homogenization of customs that expressed an emerging state orthodoxy based on what came to be called Confucian norms. The Han state promoted Confucian education among literate male elites across the empire to create a pool of potential officials that shared its values and political vision. The Han law code enforced Confucian family principles of gender and generational hierarchy and filial piety, that is, the reverence and obedience that children, especially sons, owed to their parents. But although such core patrilineal principles and beliefs about death and the afterlife that inspired Confucian ancestral rituals were part of a common Chinese culture shared across social classes, marriage, funerary, and other rituals varied widely, as did practice of gender norms such as sex segregation. Despite its pretension to social regulation, the state did not have much influence in everyday family life. The household was the key economic and social unit in a largely agrarian society, and the lives of most men and women were regulated through kin groups (Hinsch 2010).

The Book of Rites explicates the core elements of the family system that informed Han law and set an ideal standard for the population. The family was defined by patrilineal principles of descent from a common male ancestor and structured by age and gender hierarchies. Under the rubric of filial piety, men and women were all supposed to be subservient first to their living parents and grandparents, in addition to performing ongoing respect for previous generations of elders through ancestral rituals. Marriage was patrilocal. The husband’s parents chose a bride to bring into the family as a strategy to ensure the success and perpetuation of the patriline. Women were additionally subordinate to men according to the rubric of the Three Obediences, which prescribed subservience to their fathers before marriage, to their husbands in marriage, and to their sons in widowhood. In a state system where loyalty to the ruler was cemented through marriage ties with powerful elite families, which were then able to exercise power through daughters married into the court, political bonds and sexual bonds were conflated: a wife’s loyalty to her husband was equivalent to a court minister’s loyalty to his ruler. The resulting tension between an inner court dominated by the ruler’s consorts and their natal families and an outer court controlled by male officials became a central feature of the political system as China entered its imperial period.

To deal with this tension, the Book of Rites provided an elaborate template for orderly gender relations based on two binary pairs: the cosmological concepts of yin and yang and the notion of inner (nei) and outer (wai) realms. The polarity of yin and yang was a rubric for describing the dynamism of the natural and human worlds in terms of the shifting relationship between complementary opposites. When the concepts first appeared in texts of the Zhou period, they were not necessarily hierarchical, nor did they correlate with female and male. But in the middle of the Han dynasty in the first century BCE, when scholars solidified a Confucian orthodoxy that saw the human body, the family, the state, and the cosmos as analogous and mutually reinforcing, yin and yang came to be hierarchically correlated with earth...