The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China

Columbia University Press，2024

ISBN 9780231214131

In imperial China, people moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth in different ways and for many reasons. Eunuchs, boy actresses, and clergy left behind normative gender roles defined by family and procreation. “Stone maidens”—women deemed physically incapable of vaginal intercourse—might depart from families or marriages to become Buddhist or Daoist nuns. Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupation such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit. Yet they were often punished harshly for the crime of “masquerading in women’s attire,” suspected of sexual predation, even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for many years.

Exploring these histories and many more, this book is a groundbreaking study of transgender lives and practices in late imperial China. Through close readings of court cases, as well as Ming and Qing fiction and nineteenth-century newspaper accounts, Matthew H. Sommer examines the social, legal, and cultural histories of gender crossing. He considers a range of transgender experiences, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular social contexts and penalized in others. Sommer scrutinizes the ways Qing legal authorities and literati writers represented and understood gender-nonconforming people and practices, contrasting official ideology with popular mentalities. An unprecedented account of China’s transgender histories, this book also sheds new light on a range of themes in Ming and Qing law, religion, medicine, literature, and culture.

苏成捷（Matthew H. Sommer），加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校历史学博士，现为斯坦福大学历史系教授。擅长利用司法档案研究清代中国的性、社会性别关系和法律。出版有Sex，Law， and Society in Late Imperial China和Polyandry and Wife-selling in Qing Dynasty China两部学术专著，并在Late Imperial China、Modern China等学术刊物上发表论文多篇。

Acknowledgments

Conventions in the Text
Introduction
1. Transgender Paradigms in Late Imperial China
2. The Paradigm of the Cross-Dressing Predator
3. Clergy as Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
4. Creativity Inspired by Torment?
5. The Fox Spirit Medium
6. The Truth of the Body
7. The Hustler
Epilogue
Character List
Notes
References
Index

Matthew Sommer makes splendid use of contemporary transgender theory to shed light upon, and gain new insight into, late imperial Chinese society. Far from anachronistically imposing a presentist category on the radical difference of the past, Sommer examines a variety of individual cases in which manifold practices of gender-crossing allow previously underappreciated aspects of law, religion, literature, and social order to click into focus with startling clarity.

——Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution

In equal measure theoretically informed and richly documented, Matthew Sommer’s newest book centers around six cases of male-to-female cross-dressers or intersex commoners in Qing China who eventually get caught up in legal altercations. Sommer’s definition of transgender is broad—essentially anyone living outside Confucian familial norms—comprising a continuum from monks who “left the family,” to eunuchs, cross-dressing actors, intersex brides, and those who “passed” male for female (until they were outed), many of whom met a violent end. Charting the fear that those who engaged in trans practices must have harbored nefarious motives, all the while suggesting that such lifestyles were much more common and accepted in everyday life than we might imagine, this provocative historicization of transgendering in late imperial China is at once both universal and deeply particular. Its lucid prose should make this study accessible well beyond the China field.

——Andrea Goldman, author of Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770-1900