Performing Yin/Yang: Male-male Relationships in Qing China

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-277-4_14How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Yin/Yang; Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio; Male-male relationships; Emotion

Abstract

The exploration of same-sex desire in pre modern China has emerged as a compelling subject, garnering considerable scholarly interest in recent times. Researchers have unearthed distinctive aspects of gender identity within Chinese culture, notably the yin (feminine, soft)/yang (masculine, strong) and wen (civil)/wu (martial) dynamics, offering insights that starkly contrast with contemporary Western perceptions of homosexuality and heterosexuality. Therefore, this essay chooses Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi in Chinese) as the research subject, and uses three typical stories of “Huang Jiulang”, “The Hermaphrodite”, and “Male Concubine” for specific story analysis, aiming to deepen people’s understanding of the emotional landscape of pre modern Chinese society by revealing the multifaceted emotions and social complexity of male-male relationships in the Qing Dynasty, and explore the diversity of human sexuality and its significance in transcending the limitations of modern sexual identity binary. The research suggests that the unique and vibrant emotions depicted by Liaozhai challenge the conventional tenets of Confucian ritual propriety, representing a return to personal inner desires, which reveals the emotional panorama of pre modern Chinese society.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Shuwei Wang
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/09/02
TI  - Performing Yin/Yang: Male-male Relationships in Qing China
BT  - Proceedings of the 2024 10th International Conference on Humanities and Social Science Research (ICHSSR 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 108
EP  - 115
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-277-4_14
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-277-4_14
ID  - Wang2024
ER  -