1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,900 The following is part of Cornell  Contemporary China Initiative lecture   2 00:00:03,900 --> 00:00:08,040 series, under the Cornell East Asia  Program. The arguments and viewpoints   3 00:00:08,040 --> 00:00:11,850 of this talk belong solely to the speaker.  We hope you enjoy. 4 00:00:11,850 --> 00:00:18,719 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to Cornell  Contemporary China Initiative lecture series. 5 00:00:18,719 --> 00:00:27,240 My name is Mara Yue Du. I'm the director of the CCCI series in Spring 2023, with the theme Engendering China. 6 00:00:27,240 --> 00:00:34,240 And I am an assistant professor teaching history at the Department of History at Cornell University. 7 00:00:34,240 --> 00:00:44,340 Launched in 2015, this lecture series has brought hundreds of leading scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds to   8 00:00:44,340 --> 00:00:50,220 share their cutting-edge research on China with  Cornell students, faculty, and the general public.   9 00:00:50,220 --> 00:00:58,500 This series is sponsored by the Cornell East Asia Program. Here, I would also like to express   10 00:00:58,500 --> 00:01:07,080 my sincere gratitude to the co-founders of this  series in Spring 2013: the Department of Asian   11 00:01:07,080 --> 00:01:13,140 Studies, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, the  Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program,   12 00:01:13,140 --> 00:01:20,580 the Department of History, ILR School's Global  Labor Institute, the Levinson China and Asian- 13 00:01:20,580 --> 00:01:27,180 Pacific Studies Program, and Cornell Society for  humanities. Before we formally start, I want to 14 00:01:27,180 --> 00:01:36,292 announce our next CCCI lecture and also the last lecture of this semester, that would be from Professor Yige Dong  15 00:01:36,292 --> 00:01:44,580 from the Department of Sociology at the University  of Buffalo. She's coming on May 8th to talk 16 00:01:44,580 --> 00:01:51,100 about the The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Socialist China. 17 00:01:51,360 --> 00:01:58,200 May 8th would be a Monday and the  lecture starts at 4:45, the same location.   18 00:01:58,980 --> 00:02:05,411 It's a great honor for me to introduce our speaker today Professor Matthew Sommer. 19 00:02:05,411 --> 00:02:11,760 Professor Matthew Sommer is a Bowman Family Professor of History and and, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages 20 00:02:11,760 --> 00:02:18,420 and Cultures at Stanford University. He received his  PhD in History from the University of California,   21 00:02:18,420 --> 00:02:26,760 Los Angeles in 1994. Since then, he has become one  leading scholar in the field of social history,   22 00:02:26,760 --> 00:02:33,180 gender history, and the legal history of late imperial  China. Among many publications, there are   23 00:02:33,180 --> 00:02:39,900 three books: Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China, published by Stanford University   24 00:02:39,900 --> 00:02:48,888 Press in 2000. And recently, Polyandry and Wife-selling in Qing Dynasty China from University of California 25 00:02:48,888 --> 00:02:55,800 Press, 2018. Today, Professor Sommer  comes to talk about his upcoming work with   26 00:02:55,800 --> 00:03:06,660 Columbia University press on Transgender in Qing Dynasty China. Since Spring 2022, the CCCI series have been held   27 00:03:06,660 --> 00:03:14,040 both in-person on campus and also broadcasting  online via Zoom. To those who are attending this   28 00:03:14,040 --> 00:03:19,740 lecture today via Zoom, please feel free to type your questions and comments to the chat box   29 00:03:19,740 --> 00:03:26,460 anytime during the lecture. The questions will be  covered after the lecture during the Q&A session. 30 00:03:27,900 --> 00:03:36,000 And also the video will be made available  online uh several weeks after talk, please feel   31 00:03:36,000 --> 00:03:42,240 free to share with your friends and colleagues  um if they cannot make it due to schedule   32 00:03:42,240 --> 00:03:48,580 conflicts. Now let us welcome Professor  Sommer with warm applause. [Applause] 33 00:03:53,580 --> 00:04:00,960 Thank you, can everyone hear me? Thank you Mara,  it's an honor to be here a pleasure. I want to   34 00:04:00,960 --> 00:04:05,760 thank my hoster Cornell, especially Professor Du,  but also Amala Lane who has handled the logistics   35 00:04:05,760 --> 00:04:11,820 beautifully so far. We'll hope everything works um.  So today I want to talk a bit about some of the   36 00:04:11,820 --> 00:04:18,000 material I'm going to present in my forthcoming  book. The title of the book is stone the stone   37 00:04:18,000 --> 00:04:23,700 maiden who became a nun, and other transgender  tales From late imperial China, and I can tell   38 00:04:23,700 --> 00:04:29,400 you more about the title later if you like. So in  this talk, I'm going to present three case studies   39 00:04:29,400 --> 00:04:34,560 from the Qing of people who were assigned male  at birth but who lived as women, while carefully   40 00:04:34,560 --> 00:04:40,560 concealing their male anatomy from other people. One presented themselves as a widow and had a   41 00:04:40,560 --> 00:04:46,140 successful career as a midwife for 30 years, two  others practiced faith-healing and they enjoyed   42 00:04:46,140 --> 00:04:50,940 relationships with male partners whom they served  as wives. All three of these people eventually were   43 00:04:50,940 --> 00:04:56,759 exposed and they were prosecuted for the crime  of "nan ban nu zhuang" masquerading in women's attire. 44 00:04:56,759 --> 00:05:02,160 What were the circumstances of these individuals lives,  and how did Qing officials interpret their violation   45 00:05:02,160 --> 00:05:08,100 of normative gender boundaries? Those are the  questions I will address today. Now first of all, 46 00:05:13,800 --> 00:05:20,280 there we go, oops, was not responding, we  all we're all here, okay good. So first of all,   47 00:05:20,280 --> 00:05:25,320 what do I mean by transgender? Now this is a very  fraught category today in our politics as you know.   48 00:05:26,100 --> 00:05:32,820 Basically I am using Susan Stryker's definition  which focuses on practice rather than any sort of   49 00:05:32,820 --> 00:05:38,880 constant trans-historical identity. So Stryker  defines transgender people as those who move   50 00:05:38,880 --> 00:05:43,020 away from the gender they were assigned at  birth, they're people who cross over or trans-   51 00:05:43,020 --> 00:05:49,020 the boundaries constructed by their culture  to define and contain their gender. This is a   52 00:05:49,020 --> 00:05:54,900 line from her important book Transgender History.  And following Stryker, other historians of this   53 00:05:54,900 --> 00:06:00,780 very small but rapidly growing field have been  focusing really on practices rather than imagining   54 00:06:00,780 --> 00:06:06,360 that the categories that are familiar today - for  identities - should somehow be imported to the past. 55 00:06:07,200 --> 00:06:12,900 If you think about the term "transgender"  in English as an as an identity category or   56 00:06:12,900 --> 00:06:17,100 umbrella category for identity, has been common  in the United States really only since the 1990s,   57 00:06:17,100 --> 00:06:23,520 barely 30 years, and a priority of trans-  or politics today is self-determination,   58 00:06:23,520 --> 00:06:27,840 the idea being that it is I who get to judge  what my gender is based on my own subjective   59 00:06:27,840 --> 00:06:34,260 perception of my identity. It's not for others  to label me right. So based on that perspective   60 00:06:34,260 --> 00:06:39,300 and on the fact that our categories and labels  and vocabulary are quite new, uh historians are   61 00:06:39,300 --> 00:06:43,440 they don't want to risk the anachronism of  imposing these labels on people in the past   62 00:06:43,440 --> 00:06:49,200 in times and places very different from our own, but also I think it seems presumptuous to label   63 00:06:49,200 --> 00:06:53,940 people who cannot speak for themselves, right.  So instead historians following Stryker have   64 00:06:53,940 --> 00:06:58,320 increasingly focused on practices - practices  of movement away from the gender assigned at   65 00:06:58,320 --> 00:07:03,300 birth, without necessarily assuming the  motivation for that, or the end point, or   66 00:07:03,300 --> 00:07:07,800 whether it's permanent or temporary. And  that flexibility and focus on practice   67 00:07:07,800 --> 00:07:13,080 allows us to bring together an interesting range  of phenomena of behaviors and practices of people   68 00:07:13,080 --> 00:07:18,540 and to make comparisons, but also draw contrast  between different times and places in a way that's   69 00:07:18,540 --> 00:07:26,160 fruitful. And increasingly, historians use trans as  a verb as in "to transgender" so Jen Manion   70 00:07:26,160 --> 00:07:29,820 is one of the people who've pioneered that usage  of the word and that is how I will use it today. 71 00:07:34,320 --> 00:07:39,480 So before I get into the particular cases, I just  want to remind everyone what people look like in   72 00:07:39,480 --> 00:07:45,180 the Qing Dynasty. So not everybody of course, but  here he has a man on the left and women on the   73 00:07:45,180 --> 00:07:50,880 right. What are the gender cues? Here for men in the  Qing Dynasty, it was tonsure, so this hairstyle   74 00:07:50,880 --> 00:07:54,120 where the front of the head is shaved and the  rest of the hair has grown long and braided,   75 00:07:54,120 --> 00:07:59,820 this was imposed on all Chinese men except for  Buddhist and Taoist clergy by the Qing Dynasty   76 00:07:59,820 --> 00:08:05,160 when it conquered the Ming Empire in the 17th  century. So that was probably the most obvious   77 00:08:05,160 --> 00:08:10,080 gender cue that somebody was a man. In the case  of women, the hair obviously was different so if a   78 00:08:10,080 --> 00:08:14,940 woman if a person had hair grown out in the front  then and not braided in this way, then they would   79 00:08:14,940 --> 00:08:19,380 be identified as women. Also of course you had  bound feet in many women, not all, but many women   80 00:08:19,380 --> 00:08:25,500 across social classes, and the body more covered  right. So here's just a couple of shots of men   81 00:08:25,500 --> 00:08:29,580 and women, so perhaps you can use these pictures  to visualize the people I'll be talking about. 82 00:08:41,252 --> 00:08:46,620 So the first case so these are the three  cases and they're all cases of the crime of   83 00:08:46,620 --> 00:08:52,020 nan ban nu zhuang, uh the "zhuang" sometimes 假装的装, sometimes 化妆的妆, 84 00:08:52,020 --> 00:08:55,920 that's the basic term, there's some variation.  Sometimes it's uh 男装女扮 but   85 00:08:55,920 --> 00:09:00,960 anyway for a man to masquerade in women's attire  um and that was prosecuted as I'll talk about in   86 00:09:00,960 --> 00:09:07,140 a moment under heterodoxy. And so these are the  three cases on the left we have the names these   87 00:09:07,140 --> 00:09:11,880 individuals were given by their parents when  they were identified as male, and on the right   88 00:09:11,880 --> 00:09:16,140 we have the names they assumed when they were  living as women. So first I'll talk about Xiong Mumu. 89 00:09:18,480 --> 00:09:27,240 So um in 1723, a woman aged 40 sui arrived at a  village in Anfu county in in Hunan, looking for   90 00:09:27,240 --> 00:09:32,820 work and she introduced herself as Xiong Mumu,  which means roughly elder sister-in-law Xiong and she   91 00:09:32,820 --> 00:09:37,380 was from Wuling County to the North. She explained  that she was a widow, she had been widowed in   92 00:09:37,380 --> 00:09:41,400 her youth but in order to escape her in-laws  pressure to remarry and preserve her chastity, 93 00:09:41,400 --> 00:09:46,320 she had shaved her head and become a Buddhist  nun. More recently, however, she left the temple   94 00:09:46,320 --> 00:09:51,720 she returned to lay life and she was had grown  her hair back out. She claimed to be a skilled   95 00:09:51,720 --> 00:09:57,120 midwife and a healer of women's illnesses, and when  put to the test this proved to be true. She was a   96 00:09:57,120 --> 00:10:01,500 skilled midwife. So she settled down and she became  a popular figure in her community. She was friendly,   97 00:10:01,500 --> 00:10:06,120 she had a good sense of humor, there was demand  for her skills. Midwifery was one of the few days   98 00:10:06,120 --> 00:10:11,880 that a single woman might make a living in Qing  society, and Xiong Mumu was successful and provided   99 00:10:11,880 --> 00:10:16,320 services in this village and nearby villages  and she was able to earn quite a bit of money.   100 00:10:16,320 --> 00:10:22,320 So after three years, she had saved enough money  to adopt a young landless peasant as her son. This   101 00:10:22,320 --> 00:10:29,100 was supposed to be a Ji Zi继子 to carry on the family line of her "dead husband" and then   102 00:10:29,100 --> 00:10:34,860 she also paid for him to take a wife, and then  that couple, her son and daughter-in-law, adopted   103 00:10:34,860 --> 00:10:42,000 a son, and acquired a wife for the adopted son as  well. And she also pledged kinship with three young   104 00:10:42,000 --> 00:10:47,460 women in the village, taking them as her gan nu er干女儿,  so her dry daughters, this is a kind of fictive   105 00:10:47,460 --> 00:10:54,000 kinship popular in China. So in this way Xiong Mumu created a kinship network of eight people and from her   106 00:10:54,000 --> 00:10:59,640 earnings as midwife, she paid for all the expenses  for the adoptions, the marriages, and so on. Now the   107 00:10:59,640 --> 00:11:09,120 foundation of her household was land. By the time  of Xiong Mumu's arrest in 1744, two decades later, they   108 00:11:09,120 --> 00:11:14,700 had amassed 32 mu of paddy land and were living  in a six-room house. By the standards of the   109 00:11:14,700 --> 00:11:20,400 Communist era, in this part of Hunan, that would have qualified Xiong Mumu as a fu nong - a rich peasant - 110 00:11:20,400 --> 00:11:27,000 if not, a small landlord. So they were quite prosperous.  So Xiong Mumu also sent money back to her natal   111 00:11:27,000 --> 00:11:31,200 family to pay for the marriage of her younger  brother who was her only sibling. Uh and after   112 00:11:31,200 --> 00:11:37,020 living in the community peacefully for 21 years, Xiong  Mumu became involved in a lawsuit with the same brother.   113 00:11:38,580 --> 00:11:43,500 By this time she had reached the age of 60 sui,  and somehow she had stayed in touch with her   114 00:11:43,500 --> 00:11:48,360 natal family all along. Her parents died but her  brother, who was her only brother, had taken over   115 00:11:48,360 --> 00:11:55,260 their parents' land and refused to share with his sister. This angers Xiong Mumu and she filed a lawsuit because   116 00:11:55,260 --> 00:12:00,660 as she stated in her plaint, she believed that she  deserved a half share of their father's estate.   117 00:12:01,560 --> 00:12:06,120 Now on the face of it, if you don't know anything  about inheritance practices in the Qing Dynasty,   118 00:12:06,120 --> 00:12:11,580 this claim was absurd because everybody knew  that both in custom and law, brothers divided   119 00:12:11,580 --> 00:12:19,500 their father's estate in equal shares and sisters received nothing in fen jia分家, zhu zi jun fen诸子均分 is the principle. 120 00:12:19,500 --> 00:12:23,940 In prosperous families something would be set  aside for a sister's dowry but in fen jia they   121 00:12:23,940 --> 00:12:30,060 did not inherit property. All became clear however,  so for for her to claim that she would get 50 percent 122 00:12:30,060 --> 00:12:35,040 that was claiming a brother's share, but she is a  sister, how could she claim that? So it's a kind of   123 00:12:35,040 --> 00:12:40,320 contradiction. Everything began clear however  when her brother filed his counterpaint his   124 00:12:40,320 --> 00:12:45,360 su zhuang. In fact, he explained, his sister was a  man and had been masquerading as a woman for   125 00:12:45,360 --> 00:12:52,200 the past 30 plus years. So Xiong Mumu was arrested,  examined by a midwife on the Magistrate's orders.   126 00:12:52,200 --> 00:12:56,940 The Midwife reported that Xiong Mumu had what  she deemed to be normal male anatomy, in other   127 00:12:56,940 --> 00:13:03,600 words, there was no evidence of genital anomaly or  disease and therefore was a man. In effect the   128 00:13:03,600 --> 00:13:08,520 Midwife reassigned the gender that Xiong had  been assigned at birth. Now confronted with this   129 00:13:08,520 --> 00:13:12,456 evidence in the courtroom, Xiong Mumu confessed that it was true, 130 00:13:12,456 --> 00:13:15,000 their real name was Xiong Ersheng, they had never married. 131 00:13:17,160 --> 00:13:22,380 They had never married, and at the age of 26, they  had left home, grown out their hair in the manner   132 00:13:22,380 --> 00:13:26,880 of a woman, pierced their ears, bound their feet,  loosely we can presume, because she was already   133 00:13:26,880 --> 00:13:32,460 an adult, and adopted women's dress. They provided  no explanation for the decision to live as woman   134 00:13:32,460 --> 00:13:35,820 nor did they explain how they acquired training  as a midwife, which is a very interesting question,   135 00:13:35,820 --> 00:13:41,940 because men didn't do that. The Magistrate had  Xiong beaten for this masquerade and ordered   136 00:13:41,940 --> 00:13:46,260 them to adopt a male attire and tonsure and  to be deported to their home county under the   137 00:13:46,260 --> 00:13:52,980 supervision of their brother. But the provincial  Governor heard about this case and he ordered   138 00:13:52,980 --> 00:13:57,540 Xiong re-arrested. So we know this story because the  governor then reported it to the Qianlong emperor   139 00:13:57,540 --> 00:14:05,220 in a confidential memorial, which remains on file  at the palace archive in Beijing. The governor   140 00:14:05,220 --> 00:14:09,720 expressed outrage at the local Magistrate's  lenience as he confided to the emperor   141 00:14:10,560 --> 00:14:17,280 "This criminal Xiong Ersheng, despite being male, has  masqueraded in women's attire for more than   142 00:14:17,280 --> 00:14:23,820 30 years, adopting dry daughters, and  using the alias 'Xiong Mumu.' On that basis, we can   143 00:14:23,820 --> 00:14:31,860 be sure without bothering to ask that he must have  seduced and raped women on a routine basis. 144 00:14:32,580 --> 00:14:37,140 Someone who destroys family relations and injures  the public morality in such an egregious manner   145 00:14:37,140 --> 00:14:42,600 cannot be tolerated in your Majesty's sacred  realm. Xiong Ersheng's crimes must have taken   146 00:14:42,600 --> 00:14:47,400 place in the obscurity of the female chambers  and an exhaustive investigation would involve   147 00:14:47,400 --> 00:14:51,540 countless people and endless trouble. Moreover, it  is inevitable that some of the implicated women,   148 00:14:51,540 --> 00:14:57,600 upon hearing than this, would commit suicide  out of shame. The scale of harm is truly great.   149 00:14:58,800 --> 00:15:04,740 So the governor promised to hold Xiong in jail  to scour the village for their accomplices, while   150 00:15:04,740 --> 00:15:09,780 interrogating Xiong further under pressure  to ascertain what other acts of sorcery or   151 00:15:09,780 --> 00:15:14,700 debauchery they might have committed. The  governor also recommended that Xiong be   152 00:15:14,700 --> 00:15:20,580 beaten to death in an extraordinary  punishment. Now in contrast with um 153 00:15:23,400 --> 00:15:29,100 sorry in contrast with the governor's  rather hysterical memorial, the emperor's   154 00:15:29,100 --> 00:15:35,520 reaction was rather mild. He ordered lenience,  comparatively speaking, "it appears that   155 00:15:35,520 --> 00:15:39,120 this criminal has not yet committed any  offense grave enough to warrant death,   156 00:15:39,120 --> 00:15:44,280 therefore make sure he is properly attired  tonsure as a man, and have the board of punishment   157 00:15:44,280 --> 00:15:49,080 send him to Northern Manchuria (Heilongjiang) to  spend the rest of his life as a slave in the army.   158 00:15:49,800 --> 00:15:56,940 Xiong Mumu is 60 at this point so we can only guess  how short and unpleasant the rest of their life   159 00:15:56,940 --> 00:16:03,240 would have been. Now this story raises a number of  questions. What motivated Xiong to live as a woman?   160 00:16:03,900 --> 00:16:08,820 They did so at Great risk as the consequences  of exposure make clear. It may well be that if   161 00:16:08,820 --> 00:16:14,940 Xiong were alive today, they would self-identify  as a trans woman, but that is speculation and, to   162 00:16:14,940 --> 00:16:19,800 be sure, the identity category of trans woman was  not available in 18th century China, at least not   163 00:16:19,800 --> 00:16:25,620 in anything resembling the meaning that it  has for us today. Be that as it may, Xiong obviously   164 00:16:25,620 --> 00:16:29,940 felt a powerful motivation to live as woman and  was able to live in that identity without any   165 00:16:29,940 --> 00:16:33,720 trouble that we know of for some three decades.  In fact, they were popular in their community.   166 00:16:34,560 --> 00:16:38,700 But the authorities who interrogated and  prosecuted Xiong all treated this as a case of   167 00:16:38,700 --> 00:16:44,100 a man pretending to be a woman for what they  assumed to be nefarious predatory purposes.   168 00:16:45,120 --> 00:16:49,680 From what we can tell, Xiong was never asked about  their motive for wanting to live as a woman or   169 00:16:49,680 --> 00:16:53,760 about their subjective consciousness at all.  Rather, the governor's rhetoric makes it obvious   170 00:16:53,760 --> 00:16:59,340 that he already knew the only plausible motive  for such behavior was to seduce or rape women.   171 00:16:59,880 --> 00:17:06,046 In the governor's own words "bu wen ke zhi 不问可知",   we can be sure without even bothering to ask that Xiong 172 00:17:06,046 --> 00:17:11,700 had committed these crimes. This despite the fact that as far as we can tell, the investigation found no evidence   173 00:17:11,700 --> 00:17:17,460 that Xiong ever harmed anyone, or even ever had  sex with anyone. In fact there were no complaints   174 00:17:17,460 --> 00:17:22,860 against them at all from their community. If it  hadn't been for this quixotic lawsuit, probably   175 00:17:22,860 --> 00:17:26,880 there'd be no trace in historical record, this  person never lived. On the contrary this was   176 00:17:26,880 --> 00:17:32,460 a popular and valued member of their community.  So where did the governor's knowledge come from,   177 00:17:32,460 --> 00:17:39,240 why was the governor so sure that Xiong Mumu is a  sex predator? Well let's step back for a moment,   178 00:17:39,240 --> 00:17:44,880 consider how cross-dressing and the transing of  gender were understood in Ming and Qing China   179 00:17:44,880 --> 00:17:48,840 and I'm going to be very schematic and brief here,  there's a lot more that one can talk about, but   180 00:17:50,100 --> 00:17:56,100 um so if we think of female to male passing,  obviously the most famous paradigm is the woman   181 00:17:56,100 --> 00:18:02,040 warrior of whom Hua Mulan is the most famous example.  According to this paradigm, a virtuous young woman   182 00:18:02,040 --> 00:18:07,200 acts out of filial duty to take her father's or  brother's place in the military draft, she passes as 183 00:18:07,200 --> 00:18:12,060 a man temporarily in order to do her duty as a  soldier, always carefully guarding her chastity,   184 00:18:12,060 --> 00:18:16,920 staying within the bounds of propriety, keeping  her sex secret. And when her duty is fulfilled,   185 00:18:16,920 --> 00:18:23,700 she resumes female attire, as you see here and  returns home to her duty as a daughter. In other   186 00:18:23,700 --> 00:18:29,280 words, Mulan is an exception that proves the  rule: her gender passing is justified only by   187 00:18:29,280 --> 00:18:35,040 her selfless devotion to Confucian propriety. This  positive paradigm illustrates by implication, it   188 00:18:35,040 --> 00:18:40,020 seems to me, the dangers of violating the proper  separation of the sexes, the danger that a woman   189 00:18:40,020 --> 00:18:43,860 might attempt to pass as a man in order to  escape supervision, and engage perhaps in   190 00:18:43,860 --> 00:18:49,140 sexual promiscuity. Mulan is a kind of exception  that proves the rule. Now it's interesting that in   191 00:18:49,140 --> 00:18:54,300 the modern era, Mulan has been cited as a heroine  and has been repurposed in a sense as a nationalist  192 00:18:54,300 --> 00:19:00,180 feminist heroine, inspiring revolutionaries  who have adopted masculine attire in order to   193 00:19:00,180 --> 00:19:07,740 declare their selfless commitment to performing a  public role in a political cause and to reject the   194 00:19:07,740 --> 00:19:12,120 old gender system. So a famous progenitor of this of course was Qiu Jin, the revolutionary   195 00:19:12,120 --> 00:19:17,700 martyr on the eve of 1911, on the left dressed  as a western-style man, and the middle dressed   196 00:19:17,700 --> 00:19:22,800 as a modern Japanese woman holding a bayonet,  and then on the right dresses a Chinese man.   197 00:19:23,760 --> 00:19:31,500 Um and she was a role model, then of course  we have really from the the early women Communists   198 00:19:31,500 --> 00:19:35,820 through the amazons of the northern expedition  down through the Mao era or the iron girls, the red   199 00:19:35,820 --> 00:19:42,780 guards and so on. We have numerous examples of this,  of women and girls dressing as men or even more   200 00:19:42,780 --> 00:19:48,060 provocative in army uniform, to declare their  political commitment and to reject traditional   201 00:19:48,060 --> 00:19:56,340 gender roles. So that's one Paradigm for transing  of gender, the female to male. Another paradigm I   202 00:19:56,340 --> 00:20:02,760 would argue is Chujia, exiting the family. Now so here I'm talking about clergy, Buddhist and Taoist   203 00:20:02,760 --> 00:20:07,020 clergy on the one hand and then eunuchs on the  other the eunuchs of the palaces in Beijing. 204 00:20:07,620 --> 00:20:12,480 These individuals abandon normative gender  roles that are defined in terms of marriage   205 00:20:12,480 --> 00:20:17,520 and reproduction within the family, by leaving the  family literally and figuratively, they are leaving   206 00:20:17,520 --> 00:20:22,020 behind normative gender roles. And so I believe  they fit Stryker's definition of transing   207 00:20:22,020 --> 00:20:26,640 gender very well. Not everyone agrees with me  on this point, but I think if you think about   208 00:20:26,640 --> 00:20:33,060 the definition I'm using, they fit rather well.  So for example, clergy would shave their heads   209 00:20:33,060 --> 00:20:39,180 if they were Buddhist clergy, Taoist clergy had a  unisex kind of not tonsure but a kind of [inaudible] 210 00:20:39,180 --> 00:20:44,940 they used. It's saying that that male Taoist and  Buddhist clergy are the only Chinese men who were   211 00:20:44,940 --> 00:20:49,500 not required to conform to the Manchu tonsure, all  other Chinese men are required to conform to it. 212 00:20:50,280 --> 00:20:56,820 So the clergy would wear baggy gender-neutral  clothing, upon leaving the family they were given   213 00:20:56,820 --> 00:21:03,300 new names, they were and and the clerical lineage  would replace the lineage of their own families.  214 00:21:04,260 --> 00:21:10,560 They were supposed to forswear sex, marriage,  and procreation altogether. They lived in single-   215 00:21:10,560 --> 00:21:17,340 sex communities, and they would undergo at least  some degree of de-gender training. You see this   216 00:21:17,340 --> 00:21:22,080 in Taiwan, even recently, when women become  Buddhist nuns, they receive what amounts to   217 00:21:22,080 --> 00:21:26,700 a kind of de-feminization training to eliminate  their feminine mannerisms in speech, body language,   218 00:21:26,700 --> 00:21:32,160 comportment, and so on. They refer to themselves as  Zhong Xing - gender neutral, and I think this shows an   219 00:21:32,160 --> 00:21:35,820 acute awareness of the difference between gender  as a role when learns and performs on the one   220 00:21:35,820 --> 00:21:44,520 hand, and bodily sex on the other. So clergy in the  case of eunuchs, eunuchs also were required to renounce   221 00:21:44,520 --> 00:21:48,900 sex, marriage, and reproduction, leaving behind  their families, and also normative family-based   222 00:21:48,900 --> 00:21:54,000 gender roles. They would join the imperial  household as what amounted to slaves, upon   223 00:21:54,000 --> 00:21:58,440 entering service, they experienced what someone  called a rebirth and were given new names as   224 00:21:58,440 --> 00:22:04,440 part of a mentoring lineage of eunuchs, where senior  eunuchs would mentor and socialize younger eunuchs. 225 00:22:05,040 --> 00:22:10,020 Eunuchs who were rejected for imperial service  typically became Buddhist or Taoist clergy, as   226 00:22:10,020 --> 00:22:14,160 would eunuchs who retired, and there were some  Buddhist temples and Taoist temples in Beijing   227 00:22:14,160 --> 00:22:21,420 that functioned essentially as retirement homes  for for retired eunuchs. Similarly, young women who   228 00:22:21,420 --> 00:22:26,580 were diagnosed as "shi nu", stone maidens,  this was an anatomical condition which made it   229 00:22:26,580 --> 00:22:32,520 possible for the woman to be penetrated vaginally,  and therefore they were considered ineligible for   230 00:22:32,520 --> 00:22:37,980 marriage. The typical way of dealing with such a  woman was to make her become a Buddhist nun or a   231 00:22:37,980 --> 00:22:45,000 Taoist nun, in a sense, making a virtue of necessity  you might say. So for both clergy and eunuchs, there   232 00:22:45,000 --> 00:22:49,560 was a degree of ambiguity and in some respects  they were certainly understood to be men or in the   233 00:22:49,560 --> 00:22:54,960 case of nuns, women, there's no question about that.  So for example, in rape cases involving Buddhist   234 00:22:54,960 --> 00:23:00,600 nuns as victims, those were handled exactly the  same way as those involving a "liang jia qi nu" - a wife   235 00:23:00,600 --> 00:23:06,960 or daughter of good family - with Buddhist celibacy  being approximated to Confucian chastity. So there   236 00:23:06,960 --> 00:23:12,420 was an ambiguity about the gender of both clergy  and eunuchs and some of this I think implies a   237 00:23:12,420 --> 00:23:16,620 distinction, again, between a sexed body and a  gendered social role. For clergy in particular,   238 00:23:16,620 --> 00:23:21,960 it was in the gendered sense that they left the  family, also we know that some eunuchs self-identified   239 00:23:21,960 --> 00:23:26,220 as men and they found ways to have families in  defiance of the rules, although that was risky.   240 00:23:27,840 --> 00:23:32,940 So these are two paradigms, the first is  the woman warrior, for female to male, then   241 00:23:32,940 --> 00:23:39,300 there's the chuja - the exiting the family - I can  elaborate on these if there's time later. Now the   242 00:23:39,300 --> 00:23:45,240 available paradigms for male to female  passing were far less positively valued.   243 00:23:45,240 --> 00:23:49,980 The most famous of course is the young male  actress who played female roles in opera - the Dan 旦.  244 00:23:51,360 --> 00:23:57,540 Andrea Goldman has referred to these as "boy  actresses" which I think is a very apt term, it   245 00:23:57,540 --> 00:24:03,120 captures the paradox of their identity. In 18th  and 19th century Beijing, these actors were the   246 00:24:03,120 --> 00:24:07,800 objects of a passionate connoisseur culture  among elite men, and many actors moonlighted   247 00:24:07,800 --> 00:24:12,780 as high-end escorts and prostitutes to serve  the wealthy men who admired them. Here you   248 00:24:12,780 --> 00:24:18,240 have two young actors, the one standing  is a hua dan, male dresses a female role. 249 00:24:20,400 --> 00:24:24,960 So the these actors were the objects of the  passionate connoisseur cultural elite men,   250 00:24:24,960 --> 00:24:30,300 many actors moonlighted as high-end escorts and  prostitutes to serve the wealthy men who admired   251 00:24:30,300 --> 00:24:35,340 them. There was a whole kind of sex services  industry around the Beijing Opera in the 19th   252 00:24:35,340 --> 00:24:42,600 century in particular. Elite connoisseurs believe  that here's a famous Ming Dynasty late Ming um hua dan. 253 00:24:45,540 --> 00:24:49,860 Elite connoisseurs believe that these youthful  actors were better able to perform and embody   254 00:24:49,860 --> 00:24:54,540 an ideal feminine beauty then, and you know,  far better and more effectively than a mere   255 00:24:54,540 --> 00:25:00,960 woman could, and and here you see on the one  hand, the kind of misogyny here right, but also   256 00:25:00,960 --> 00:25:06,120 this shows of the allure of this kind of feminine  beauty was artifice, the whole point was artifice,  257 00:25:06,720 --> 00:25:10,740 a kind of gendered performance rather than what  was natural. And I think what was natural in this   258 00:25:10,740 --> 00:25:15,060 case uh had no value, nature provides us the  raw material out of which culture is made.   259 00:25:15,060 --> 00:25:20,520 So you can think of the analogy of the bound  foot or the scholars rocks or pen jing, these   260 00:25:20,520 --> 00:25:25,860 kinds of things are also examples where natural  nature simply provides the raw material, but   261 00:25:25,860 --> 00:25:31,140 also shows that the foundation of this kind  of connoisseurship of the Dan was misogyny,   262 00:25:31,140 --> 00:25:36,480 a contempt for real women, who were seen as being  unable to live up to this high feminine standard.   263 00:25:38,160 --> 00:25:42,000 Here's a famous one for the 20th century, he's  getting a bit long in the tooth in that picture   264 00:25:42,000 --> 00:25:46,620 but he was a really handsome guy wasn't he: Meilan Fang. Here he is performing. He was one   265 00:25:46,620 --> 00:25:50,820 of the "si da ming Dan" in the early 20th century.  In the early 20th century what's the name is   266 00:25:50,820 --> 00:25:56,340 that you have a kind of reinvention of Beijing  Opera in particular, as guo ju, as National Opera,  267 00:25:56,340 --> 00:26:01,800 as part of as a national classic, that's fit to be  performed in front of foreigners, for example, but   268 00:26:01,800 --> 00:26:08,940 that required suppressing the sex industry and  then suppressing the and sort of cisgendering it,   269 00:26:08,940 --> 00:26:14,400 by getting rid of the male actors of female roles,  having women trained up to perform them, and and in   270 00:26:14,400 --> 00:26:19,260 a sense, heterosexualizing it as well. And so what  you have now is something quite different than   271 00:26:19,260 --> 00:26:24,660 what you had at its height in the 19th century, um  and he was an example of a transition, where his   272 00:26:24,660 --> 00:26:28,080 generation of these male performers of female  roles, they were even in their 50s, they were   273 00:26:28,080 --> 00:26:31,500 still performing these roles, whereas back in  the Qing and the heyday of the Beijing Opera,   274 00:26:31,500 --> 00:26:36,780 these boy actresses, they would be phased out  by the time they were about 19. Once obviously   275 00:26:36,780 --> 00:26:44,340 masculine characteristics made it harder for them  convincingly to portray the alluring young woman. 276 00:26:45,180 --> 00:26:51,000 So he's already too old in that picture. By the  mid-19th century, some of the opera troops were   277 00:26:51,000 --> 00:26:55,800 making more money from the sex trade than from opera, if [inaudible Chinese name] is correct and and the opera   278 00:26:55,800 --> 00:27:00,720 served mainly as advertising for the chimes of  their charms of their actors. Sex between males was   279 00:27:00,720 --> 00:27:06,180 prohibited by the Qing Dynasty, but it was never  all that strictly enforced, it was never as high a   280 00:27:06,180 --> 00:27:12,240 priority for prosecution as was female promiscuity,  safeguarding female chastity against adultery, and   281 00:27:12,240 --> 00:27:17,760 especially rape. The chastity of the liang jia qi nu, the  wives and daughters of good family, was the true   282 00:27:17,760 --> 00:27:24,540 obsession of the Qing Judiciary, when it came to  gender and sexuality. So this leads us to a second   283 00:27:24,540 --> 00:27:28,080 paradigm for male to female crossing, and this  is the one most important for understanding our   284 00:27:28,080 --> 00:27:36,840 material today. This is the renyao, and the renyao was  a hypersexual shape-shifting sorcerer or monster   285 00:27:37,560 --> 00:27:42,000 who preyed upon chastely cloistered women. Now  there are lots of variations but the locus   286 00:27:42,000 --> 00:27:49,020 classicus for this paradigm in the Ming Qing era  was the infamous case of Sang Chong, if you read the   287 00:27:49,020 --> 00:27:53,146 the Ming Shi Lu - the veritable records of the Ming  Dynasty - there was a man named Sang Chong and 288 00:27:53,146 --> 00:28:00,000 he's portrayed as a man, he was from Taiyuanfu in Shanxi. He was executed by slicing - lingchi on the   289 00:28:00,000 --> 00:28:06,900 orders of the emperor in 1477. As a youth, Sang Chong  had apprenticed himself to a master sorcerer who   290 00:28:06,900 --> 00:28:11,640 taught him how to perform women's work such as  embroidery and to masquerade as a woman 291 00:28:11,640 --> 00:28:17,940 in order to seek employment in the female quarters  of proper households, teaching the young ladies how   292 00:28:17,940 --> 00:28:23,400 to sew and so on. Having insinuated himself among  the women, he would then proceed to seduce them,   293 00:28:23,400 --> 00:28:29,340 and if they resisted he would use black magic  to subdue them and rape them. So according to   294 00:28:29,340 --> 00:28:35,040 the Ming Shi Lu, Sang Chong later recruited seven  disciples of his own to carry out these debauchery   295 00:28:35,040 --> 00:28:41,280 over a wide geographical area, and supposedly by  the time he was arrested, Sang Chong had supposedly   296 00:28:41,280 --> 00:28:47,460 seduced or raped more than 180 women over  more than 40 counties across northern China.   297 00:28:48,000 --> 00:28:54,060 He was finally exposed, supposedly, when a man tried  to rape him, exposed his fraud and turned him into   298 00:28:54,060 --> 00:29:02,460 the authorities, his accomplices escaped. Now this  notorious case was widely reported and elaborated   299 00:29:03,300 --> 00:29:07,320 and over the next three centuries it inspired  many many many fictional accounts, some by   300 00:29:07,320 --> 00:29:12,720 famous authors like Li Yu, Pu Songling, Yuan Mei, if  you've read Liaozhai then you've read about this. 301 00:29:15,600 --> 00:29:19,500 In some accounts Sang Chong and his disciples  were literal shape-shifters, they could actually   302 00:29:19,500 --> 00:29:24,300 switch anatomy from male to female. They had  trained themselves so their penises could be   303 00:29:24,300 --> 00:29:29,220 retracted in their bodies and then pop out  as necessary and they could so they could   304 00:29:29,220 --> 00:29:34,920 facilitate their masquerade in this way. In  some scenarios they would use knockout drugs - 305 00:29:34,920 --> 00:29:41,700 meng huang yao - along with black magic as a tactic  for rape, but in all these accounts the renyao,  306 00:29:41,700 --> 00:29:46,440 this figure is a hyper masculine sexual predator  who masquerades as a woman for the sole purpose   307 00:29:46,440 --> 00:29:51,840 of worming his way into the female quarters of  good households in order to have sex with women.  308 00:29:52,740 --> 00:29:59,160 So when Qing Dynasty jurists encountered cases of "nan ban nu zhuang," men masquerading women's attire, their   309 00:29:59,160 --> 00:30:04,380 investigations were informed by this paradigm. This  is what they assumed they had on their hands. Even   310 00:30:04,380 --> 00:30:09,480 when individuals under interrogation admitted to  having enjoyed sex with men, the magistrates were   311 00:30:09,480 --> 00:30:13,860 not interested, they even showed impatience that  this was an irrelevant distraction, instead they   312 00:30:13,860 --> 00:30:18,600 would demand to know often using torture, "how many  women did you seduce," "how many women did you rape."   313 00:30:19,980 --> 00:30:23,400 According to this paradigm, male to  female transing had nothing to do   314 00:30:23,400 --> 00:30:28,500 with gender inversion, gender dysphoria,  homosexuality, even femininity. It was   315 00:30:28,500 --> 00:30:32,580 all about male possessive desire and  sexual aggression against chaste women. 316 00:30:33,780 --> 00:30:38,220 Now it's intriguing as I'm sure some of you have  noticed, it's intriguing how closely this paradigm   317 00:30:38,220 --> 00:30:44,280 of the cross-dressing sexual predator resembles  the paranoid fantasies that informed transphobia   318 00:30:44,280 --> 00:30:49,860 in the United States today. This modern transphobia  is especially hostile towards trans women, a   319 00:30:49,860 --> 00:30:54,240 classic example is the portrayal of trans women  as insane serial killers and popular Hollywood   320 00:30:54,240 --> 00:30:59,160 movies, like Psycho, Dressed to Kill, Silence  of the Lambs, and so on, this is a long list. 321 00:30:59,760 --> 00:31:05,880 A more recent example from American politics is  the effort to ban trans people from using the   322 00:31:05,880 --> 00:31:10,800 public restrooms that match their gender identity  because of the supposed danger that deranged male   323 00:31:10,800 --> 00:31:16,920 sex predators in drag would pose to the safety  of little girls, that's the rhetoric. What these   324 00:31:16,920 --> 00:31:21,120 manifestations of modern transphobia share with  the Sang Chong paradigm and with the assumptions of   325 00:31:21,120 --> 00:31:27,000 Qing Dynasty officials is the paranoid fantasy  of the trans woman as a dangerous predatory   326 00:31:27,000 --> 00:31:33,780 fraud who poses a threat to real women okay.  Incidentally, the paradigm of the cross-dressing   327 00:31:34,380 --> 00:31:39,540 sexual predator had a parallel in the way clergy  and eunuchs were perceived, and this again I think   328 00:31:39,540 --> 00:31:44,100 reinforces my sense that they should be seen  as a kind of gender transing paradigm as well.  329 00:31:44,820 --> 00:31:50,040 So for example, clergy were stereotyped in popular  culture as wolves in sheep's clothing, who only   330 00:31:50,040 --> 00:31:55,260 pretended to be celibate as a transgender. In fact  they were a bunch of lechers, mediating alcohol   331 00:31:55,260 --> 00:32:01,200 swilling lechers who wanted women right um. So  it strikes me that this stereotype was actually   332 00:32:01,200 --> 00:32:06,240 a variation on the paradigm of the cross-dressing  social predator. And so there are many examples in   333 00:32:06,240 --> 00:32:12,660 fiction but also in late Qing Dynasty newspaper accounts in Shenbao, or in this case Jianshizhai Huabao, that portray   334 00:32:12,660 --> 00:32:17,040 male clergy disguising themselves as women  for the purpose of sexual predation, sort   335 00:32:17,040 --> 00:32:21,158 of brings together both paradigms into one. So here's this case, this is from Jianshizhai Huabao. 336 00:32:24,073 --> 00:32:31,087 So he's been arrested and so the yao sen is on  the left dressed as a woman, and on the right is   337 00:32:31,087 --> 00:32:35,760 the man who is an accomplice, and they're being  there they were beaten and they're being paraded   338 00:32:35,760 --> 00:32:44,040 in this this jia kao for two people to show  the masses to show the people um and they were   339 00:32:44,040 --> 00:32:47,580 prosecuted in the French concession which is why  you have a French officer there, but they were   340 00:32:47,580 --> 00:32:51,840 prosecuted by the Chinese magistrate in the mixed  court. But there's actually a remarkable amount of   341 00:32:51,840 --> 00:32:56,760 this kind of thing in shenbao and jianshizhai huabao, you get the impression that it was not at all uncommon for   342 00:32:56,760 --> 00:33:02,880 people to be picked up on the streets in Shanghai  um and and prosecuted for cross-dressing. I think   343 00:33:02,880 --> 00:33:07,140 that this sort of thing was a lot more  common than than we would probably assume. 344 00:33:10,200 --> 00:33:17,661 Here's another case, so "lao dao zhuang nu." who pretended to be a woman, arrived at this home of a young woman 345 00:33:17,661 --> 00:33:21,240 a new bride, very beautiful, her husband's away on business and he introduced   346 00:33:21,240 --> 00:33:26,040 himself as her husband's aunt, so she lets her  in and um lets her stay for the night. In the   347 00:33:26,040 --> 00:33:31,980 middle of the night tries to rape her. He's exposed  though, and here you see the um virtuous young wife   348 00:33:31,980 --> 00:33:37,620 pointing and denouncing him, and he's been exposed  to show his hairy legs, his hairy chest right and   349 00:33:37,620 --> 00:33:45,600 uh anyway he was put to death in the zhan long,  not a nice way to die um at least according to   350 00:33:45,600 --> 00:33:52,080 the newspaper. So a similar fear attached to  eunuchs, in other words that an uncastrated male   351 00:33:52,080 --> 00:33:57,360 might sneak into the palace to have sex with the  emperor's woman, and if you know Shiji, you know   352 00:33:57,360 --> 00:34:02,580 the story of Lu Buwei, um some of you probably know  what I'm talking about, the story of of the fake   353 00:34:02,580 --> 00:34:09,840 eunuch Lao Ai, who was smuggled into the Qin palace  by Lu Buwei to have sex with the Queen Dowager. This   354 00:34:09,840 --> 00:34:14,520 is the kind of locust classicus of this paranoid  fantasy of the intact male pretending to be a   355 00:34:14,520 --> 00:34:19,380 eunuch. A corollary was the fear that a real  eunuch might somehow be able to regenerate   356 00:34:19,380 --> 00:34:26,340 his genitalia by occult means, so there are all  these stories supposedly of eunuchs eating human   357 00:34:26,340 --> 00:34:32,880 fetuses or cannibalizing young boys in order to  regrow their genitals and so in the Qing Palace   358 00:34:33,420 --> 00:34:37,980 twice a year, all eunuchs were subjected to a  strip surgeon of detailed physical examination,   359 00:34:37,980 --> 00:34:42,120 just to make sure that neither of these things had  actually happened. So this paranoid fantasy about   360 00:34:42,120 --> 00:34:48,420 the fake eunuch was there right at the top. Even  the cross-dressing actors of the of the um opera   361 00:34:48,420 --> 00:34:52,800 were to some degree objects of suspicion, the idea  being that they could they were like femme fatale   362 00:34:52,800 --> 00:34:58,140 right, they could act as spies manipulating  their elite male patrons who were often   363 00:34:58,140 --> 00:35:04,020 government officials, and learning confidential  information from them. Now if we look at Qing law,   364 00:35:05,160 --> 00:35:11,280 the Ming and shin codes contain no law against cross- dressing per se. In fact this phrase nan ban nu zhuang, 365 00:35:11,280 --> 00:35:15,840 a male masquerading in women's attire, does not appear  in either the Ming or the Qing code, which is   366 00:35:15,840 --> 00:35:20,940 not to say that such behavior was permitted. When  these cases came to official attention they were   367 00:35:20,940 --> 00:35:29,460 prosecuted under this under this statute the um "zuo dao yi duan shan huo ren min." This is the using heterodox doctrines 368 00:35:29,460 --> 00:35:37,500 to provoke and deceive the people. This statute appears in the Qing codes chapter related to the Board of Rights (li bu). 369 00:35:37,500 --> 00:35:45,480 And the concept seems rather vague, but the  statute it's commentary and code case books list   370 00:35:45,480 --> 00:35:51,360 a number of specific crimes that it covered.  So participation in heterodox religious sects,   371 00:35:51,360 --> 00:35:56,880 but also practicing black magic and engaging  in spirit possession, and making incantations,   372 00:35:56,880 --> 00:36:03,900 cheating people out of their money through quack  medicine, faith healing, other confidence schemes.   373 00:36:03,900 --> 00:36:10,020 The penalty was death by strangulation for the  main offender, and life exile or military slavery   374 00:36:10,020 --> 00:36:14,940 for accomplices, and for our Chinese readers here's  the text of the stature itself. The key phrase is 375 00:36:19,200 --> 00:36:24,120 so the Ming statute, the parentheses,  those brief sections, were added in the Qing.   376 00:36:25,320 --> 00:36:26,760 I'm going to move on here 377 00:36:31,860 --> 00:36:35,280 This is part of the ideological foundation  of course, without going into too much though.   378 00:36:35,280 --> 00:36:39,720 This is from the Book of Rites, a classic  phrase that some of you probably know uh   379 00:36:41,460 --> 00:36:45,540 um when male is distinguished from female, then  father and son will draw together an affection,   380 00:36:45,540 --> 00:36:50,280 when father and son draw together an affection,  a sense of moral duty is born, when a sense of   381 00:36:50,280 --> 00:36:54,660 moral duty is born, the rituals appropriate  to human relations will be created. Once the   382 00:36:54,660 --> 00:36:59,220 rituals have been created, all things will find  their proper place, and here's the key: without   383 00:36:59,220 --> 00:37:03,846 distinction between the sexes, there's no sense  of moral duty, and that is the way of animals. 384 00:37:06,914 --> 00:37:15,300 So this is the just one famous text that I think  is foundational for the perspective that this is   385 00:37:15,300 --> 00:37:21,900 heterodoxy. As the board of punishment observed  in an 1819 case, "in the past this board   386 00:37:21,900 --> 00:37:27,000 has adjudicated cases of men masquerading in  women's attire in the following manner: in any   387 00:37:27,000 --> 00:37:31,560 case that involved the violation or seduction  of women, or swindling the common people out of   388 00:37:31,560 --> 00:37:35,760 their money, the offenders have always been  sentenced to strangulation, according to the   389 00:37:35,760 --> 00:37:42,960 statute against heterodoxy." So cross-dressing was  linked to the statute by a web of associations   390 00:37:42,960 --> 00:37:48,660 between deceit, seduction, swindling, and black  magic. The underlying premise was the renyao 391 00:37:48,660 --> 00:37:53,520 paradigm, the Sang Chong paradigm that understood  the sole plausible motive for male to female   392 00:37:53,520 --> 00:38:00,300 passing as a desire to seduce and rape women. It  was a fraud in other words for predatory purposes.   393 00:38:02,280 --> 00:38:05,700 So again, the Book of Rites explains this  the foundation of a civilized moral order   394 00:38:05,700 --> 00:38:10,380 was the distinction between the sexes and their  socialization into respective gendered kinship   395 00:38:10,380 --> 00:38:15,360 roles, structured by the rights or rituals, in  other words, the norms, that properly govern   396 00:38:15,360 --> 00:38:22,620 human liberations. So schematically, ideally,  males as they mature, they would pursue a   397 00:38:22,620 --> 00:38:28,080 centrifugal category, whereas females pursued  a centripetal category. Ideal at about the age   398 00:38:28,080 --> 00:38:32,460 of six boys would emerge from the inner female  quarters of the household to be educated under   399 00:38:32,460 --> 00:38:36,720 the supervision of their father, participate in  the worldly sphere of work and state service.   400 00:38:37,380 --> 00:38:41,520 At the same age girls would have their ears  pierced and feet bound and thenceforth would be   401 00:38:41,520 --> 00:38:47,220 increasingly cloistered. Male and female then would  be reunited upon marriage and orthodox gender   402 00:38:47,220 --> 00:38:51,960 relations were defined by normative marriage  roles. All women were to be wives and mothers,   403 00:38:51,960 --> 00:38:57,480 all men were to be husbands and fathers. And in  the 18th and 19th centuries especially, female   404 00:38:57,480 --> 00:39:02,520 chastity was a central value defined by absolute  lifelong loyalty of a woman to one husband, 405 00:39:03,540 --> 00:39:07,440 and from that standpoint normative sexual  relations were defined as conjugal relations,   406 00:39:07,440 --> 00:39:13,140 all others being prohibited. Again as the  Board of Rites warns us, "without   407 00:39:13,140 --> 00:39:17,280 distinction between the sexes, there's no sense  of moral duty, and that is the way of animals." 408 00:39:20,520 --> 00:39:26,760 Now it's interesting that the Qing codes chapter on sex offenses - the fan jian men - which   409 00:39:26,760 --> 00:39:30,960 is in the board of punishments section,  it contains no mention of cross-dressing.   410 00:39:31,500 --> 00:39:36,180 So the fact that male to female crossing  was punished as a form of heterodoxy under   411 00:39:36,180 --> 00:39:41,400 the Board of Rites suggests the fundamentally  cosmic danger implied by the violation of gender   412 00:39:41,400 --> 00:39:48,900 boundaries and categories that this behavior  constituted. Now if we move on to our second case,   413 00:39:50,760 --> 00:40:00,600 this is about Zhang Yaoguniang, which means younger daughter Zhang. In 1818, a homeless beggar couple, a husband 414 00:40:00,600 --> 00:40:06,480 Wang Shixian, and wife Zhang Yaoguniang were arrested  in Xueshan County, Henan, and deported back to their home   415 00:40:06,480 --> 00:40:11,880 province of Hubei, where they were held in custody  at the provincial capital. It's not clear why   416 00:40:11,880 --> 00:40:16,560 they came to attention of the authorities but  suspicion focused on the wife Zhang Yaoguniang   417 00:40:16,560 --> 00:40:22,140 and a midwife who examined Zhang for the arresting  magistrate reported that this individual had what   418 00:40:22,140 --> 00:40:28,140 she deemed to be normal male genitalia. On exposure,  they confess their original name to be Peng Ziren 419 00:40:29,580 --> 00:40:33,600 So in Hubei, a county magistrate interrogated  the defendants, found them guilty of various   420 00:40:33,600 --> 00:40:38,820 offended offenses and reported his findings up  the chain of command. But the provincial judge,   421 00:40:38,820 --> 00:40:44,460 his superior, rejected his report, ordered him to  retry the case. The magistrate's second attempt   422 00:40:44,460 --> 00:40:49,200 satisfied the provincial judge, but that was then  rejected by their superior, the provincial governor,   423 00:40:49,200 --> 00:40:53,880 who reprimanded the magistrate, said there must  be more crimes here that you haven't found out   424 00:40:53,880 --> 00:41:00,900 yet, try harder. And he appointed an extraordinary  tribunal of two prefects to take over the case.   425 00:41:00,900 --> 00:41:06,480 the prefect's eventual report survived review and  was approved at all levels. Now everything we know   426 00:41:06,480 --> 00:41:12,180 about this case comes from this third report which  is the product of repeated interrogation over 18   427 00:41:12,180 --> 00:41:16,980 months, during which the defendants came under  increasingly intense pressure to confess the   428 00:41:16,980 --> 00:41:22,380 truth, in a manner that was satisfactory to the  interrogators. So it should come to know as no   429 00:41:22,380 --> 00:41:27,360 great surprise that the final account largely  conforms to the sexual predator paradigm that   430 00:41:27,360 --> 00:41:33,960 we've already discussed. According to the original  confession, Zhang Yaoguniang who was age 37 sui, was   431 00:41:33,960 --> 00:41:38,820 a homeless beggar who wandered around Hubei and Henan for most of their life, they had lived as a man, but two years   432 00:41:38,820 --> 00:41:43,320 before they decided to start "masquerading as a  woman," they explained this decision   433 00:41:43,320 --> 00:41:47,220 by saying they hoped there was a woman they would  attract more pity and perhaps more generosity.   434 00:41:47,940 --> 00:41:52,620 So they grew out their hair, pierced  their ears, bought a tattered woman's   435 00:41:52,620 --> 00:41:58,260 gown and earrings at a secondhand stall, and assumed the name Zhang Yaoguniang - youngest daughter of Zhang.   436 00:41:58,860 --> 00:42:02,400 Their chosen name is suggestive in a way  that the authority is completely ignored.   437 00:42:02,400 --> 00:42:07,800 Zhang was actually their mother's surname, so in  presenting as a woman, they chose the mother's   438 00:42:07,800 --> 00:42:11,940 surname over the fathers. In fact in effect,  they renounced their identity as a son of   439 00:42:11,940 --> 00:42:16,080 the Peng lineage and all the filial duties which  that entailed but instead of abandoning kinship   440 00:42:16,080 --> 00:42:21,060 altogether, they chose the maternal line over  the mandated paternal one, suggesting perhaps   441 00:42:21,060 --> 00:42:26,760 a stronger connection to their mother that  they wish to honor. After a couple of years, 442 00:42:28,320 --> 00:42:31,980 Zhang encountered a beggar and Wang Shixian and they decided to keep company together.   443 00:42:32,760 --> 00:42:36,900 According to their confession, Wang realized  that Zhang was a man in disguise and threatened   444 00:42:36,900 --> 00:42:40,980 to expose them. But Zhang offered to let  Wang have anal intercourse with them in   445 00:42:40,980 --> 00:42:45,060 exchange for discretion and then Zhang agreed to serve as Wang's wife forever.   446 00:42:46,140 --> 00:42:51,000 A striking feature of this relationship is that  Wang played the dominant gender and sexual roles   447 00:42:51,000 --> 00:42:55,560 as Zhang's husband but also as a penetrator in  their sexual relations, despite the fact that   448 00:42:55,560 --> 00:43:03,240 he was seven years younger than Zhang. In addition, Zhang Yaoguniang pledged themselves to a master who taught   449 00:43:03,240 --> 00:43:08,220 them a method of exorcistic healing that involves  summoning a martial spirit with an incantation.   450 00:43:09,540 --> 00:43:17,100 Here you have the incantation, it's not very easy  to translate, um they would utter the incantation   451 00:43:17,100 --> 00:43:21,240 over a bowl of water then draw a talisman in the  water with their fingers and have the afflicted   452 00:43:21,240 --> 00:43:26,220 person drink the water or they would spray it onto  the injury, and Zhang used this method to treat   453 00:43:26,220 --> 00:43:31,080 people for snake bite, and essentially because  in the Qing Dynasty, beggars were reputed to   454 00:43:31,080 --> 00:43:36,480 be snake experts, they were used for pest control,  they would hunt snakes and sell them for various   455 00:43:36,480 --> 00:43:40,800 purposes, but also they were always brought  in to treat snake bite as an injury this was   456 00:43:40,800 --> 00:43:46,920 seen as their special skill, so that's what Zhang Yaoguniang did, with this sort of faith healing. So this was   457 00:43:46,920 --> 00:43:52,800 the basic story the magistrates elicited in the  early interrogations, but further interrogation   458 00:43:52,800 --> 00:43:58,800 almost certainly under torture, extracted two  more details that were key. So first of all 459 00:44:01,740 --> 00:44:05,580 first of all Zhang Yaoguniang's faith healing  was completely a fraud intended to cheat   460 00:44:05,580 --> 00:44:10,560 people out of their money, and second Zhang's real  motive for passing as a woman was to seduce women.   461 00:44:11,100 --> 00:44:15,720 In fact, he said he succeeded in seducing  a total of two women: the first was a beggar   462 00:44:15,720 --> 00:44:19,080 with whom he had kept company for a few  days, another occasion he was able to gain   463 00:44:19,080 --> 00:44:23,280 short-term employment of the home of a peasant  managed to seduce this man's sister-in-law.   464 00:44:23,880 --> 00:44:27,060 But for various reasons, neither  woman or any witnesses could be   465 00:44:27,060 --> 00:44:31,860 someone to testify, the only evidence was the  confessions extracted under pressure. And so   466 00:44:31,860 --> 00:44:34,980 I personally find them rather suspect  although who knows what the truth was.   467 00:44:35,880 --> 00:44:43,080 It was this additional information that satisfied  the superiors, the magistrate superiors. So Zhang was   468 00:44:43,080 --> 00:44:47,940 sentenced to immediate strangulation according to  the statute against heterodoxy, their accomplice   469 00:44:47,940 --> 00:44:53,400 in other words, husband Wang was sentenced to  life slavery at the frontier for "having   470 00:44:53,400 --> 00:44:57,540 failed to report Peng Ziren's masquerade and  then abetting it by posing as Peng's husband."   471 00:44:58,560 --> 00:45:03,120 Now, it's hard to know, it's impossible to know  how much of Zhang's confession we should believe.   472 00:45:03,720 --> 00:45:07,320 There's no doubt that then Wang came under  enormous pressure to confess in a manner that   473 00:45:07,320 --> 00:45:12,000 would satisfy their interrogators and the way  their confessions developed over time appears   474 00:45:12,000 --> 00:45:16,620 to be an example of what historian Laura Stokes, my  colleague of Stanford, who studies the inquisition,   475 00:45:16,620 --> 00:45:22,980 as she has called it "creativity inspired by  torment," where the interrogators help the person   476 00:45:22,980 --> 00:45:26,760 being interrogated to craft an appropriate  confession by leading questions and so on.   477 00:45:28,020 --> 00:45:33,420 What made Peng's final confession satisfactory  was the inclusion of fraudulent faith healing and   478 00:45:33,420 --> 00:45:38,400 the seduction of women. Those details conformed  both to the paradigm of sexual predation that   479 00:45:38,400 --> 00:45:43,920 shaped official expectations and to the stern  the terms of the statute against heterodoxy,    480 00:45:43,920 --> 00:45:47,700 which specifically prohibited  summoning spirits and faith healing.   481 00:45:48,600 --> 00:45:52,980 But also the purely instrumental motives offered  for transing gender and for becoming Wang's wife   482 00:45:52,980 --> 00:45:58,680 seemed to be artifacts of interrogation. My  own guess, and it's only a guess, is that Zhang 483 00:45:58,680 --> 00:46:03,240 transgender became Wang's wife, because those were  fulfilling and meaningful things to do for them. 484 00:46:05,400 --> 00:46:09,840 Why go to such risk otherwise? But the  conceptual portfolio of Qing officials   485 00:46:09,840 --> 00:46:12,360 did not permit them to acknowledge  the reality of a transgender life. 486 00:46:14,400 --> 00:46:18,900 Now the magistrate and the superiors showed no  interest at all in Zhang's sexual relationship   487 00:46:18,900 --> 00:46:22,740 with Wang Shixian, or the fact that they  understood themselves and presented themselves to   488 00:46:22,740 --> 00:46:29,340 others as husband and wife, beyond insisting that  these facts proved Wang's complicity in the fraud, 489 00:46:30,120 --> 00:46:33,360 if anything the magistrate the what's that 490 00:46:35,760 --> 00:46:45,300 that's not me um, if anything this reference to  the sexual relations between the couple were an   491 00:46:45,300 --> 00:46:49,860 annoying distraction from discovering "the truth"  about Peng's supposed predation against women.   492 00:46:50,580 --> 00:46:55,800 Now I think there's something truly pathetic about  this account. Zhang and Wong were two impoverished   493 00:46:55,800 --> 00:46:59,160 homeless beggars who had what appears to  have been an affectionate relationship.   494 00:46:59,880 --> 00:47:04,560 It's not clear that either of them ever harmed  anyone. Even if one accepts the dubious confession   495 00:47:04,560 --> 00:47:08,880 about seducing women, both of the women in  question supposedly consented to his advances   496 00:47:08,880 --> 00:47:13,740 their advances. The magistrate insisted that  Zhang must have seduced more women of 497 00:47:13,740 --> 00:47:18,960 respectful family, but Zhang denied it, explaining "I'm covered in filth, I'm a poor beggar, no young   498 00:47:18,960 --> 00:47:23,460 woman of decent household was willing to come  anywhere near me." That sounds closer to   499 00:47:23,460 --> 00:47:29,580 the truth to me, than this fantasy of a sorcerer  wielding black magic to seduce chaste women.   500 00:47:31,020 --> 00:47:37,980 All right, the third case and final case, this is the case of Xing Shi, Liu Xing Shi. 501 00:47:37,980 --> 00:47:43,440 In the spring of 1807, the military police  responsible for security in and around Beijing   502 00:47:43,440 --> 00:47:50,040 arrested a woman named Liu Xing Shi, ageg 34,  in a nearby village. They had heard that this   503 00:47:50,040 --> 00:47:55,260 woman was practicing faith healing for sick  women by serving as a medium to channel a fox   504 00:47:55,260 --> 00:48:04,020 spirit, uttering incantations and burning incense.  So suspecting heterodoxy, the police arrested her   505 00:48:04,020 --> 00:48:09,360 along with her husband Liu Liu. The police found  Xing Shi's appearance to be unusual, to their eyes   506 00:48:09,360 --> 00:48:15,000 she looked like a man dressed as a woman, and  sure enough a midwife ordered to examine Xing Shi 507 00:48:15,000 --> 00:48:19,920 reported that they had a man's body and then Xing  confessed to having "masqueraded in women's   508 00:48:19,920 --> 00:48:26,460 attire" for more than 20 years. As a boy, their  name had been Xing Da. But what's interesting   509 00:48:26,460 --> 00:48:31,200 is that their husband Liu Liu expressed  astonishment of this revelation, he claimed   510 00:48:31,200 --> 00:48:35,880 he had no idea his wife had a male body. They'd  been married for several years, he had no idea.   511 00:48:36,780 --> 00:48:41,460 Um so Xing was orphaned as a child, taken  in off the street by a man named Hong Da, 512 00:48:41,460 --> 00:48:48,720 who provided food and shelter. After a  time Hong Da began using them oops sorry   513 00:48:49,320 --> 00:48:55,380 began using them for sex and promised to provide  for their support. So when Xing turned 16 sui, 514 00:48:56,160 --> 00:49:00,780 Hong told them to grow their hair, pierce their ears,  and dress as a woman in order to pose as Hong's 515 00:49:00,780 --> 00:49:06,900 wife and facilitate their long-term relationship.  So from then on, according to the confession, Xing   516 00:49:06,900 --> 00:49:11,040 wore woman's clothing, stayed indoors most of  the time doing women's work such as spinning   517 00:49:11,040 --> 00:49:16,020 and sewing, and presented themselves to others as  Hong's wife, using the name Hong Xing Shi, which   518 00:49:16,020 --> 00:49:24,780 means basically Mrs. Hong, nee Xing. In 1802, when Xing was 29, husband Hong fell ill with tuberculosis and could   519 00:49:24,780 --> 00:49:28,920 no longer support them, so the couple agreed  that Hong would marry Xing off to another man. 520 00:49:29,640 --> 00:49:34,440 And so pretending that Xing was his widowed  younger sister, Hong engaged a Matchmaker who   521 00:49:34,440 --> 00:49:39,480 arranged for Xing Da to marry a laborer named Liu Liu, who paid a bride price of 25 strings of cash. 522 00:49:40,320 --> 00:49:44,460 According to their testimony, Xing was so  convincing as a woman that the matchmaker   523 00:49:44,460 --> 00:49:49,560 Liu Liu and Liu's parents and older brother  all were deceived. And in fact, the matchmaker   524 00:49:49,560 --> 00:49:55,920 and Liu's parents and brother were brought in and  interrogated in the board of punishment, and they   525 00:49:55,920 --> 00:50:00,840 all claimed that they thought this was a woman,  they had no idea. So apparently very convincing. 526 00:50:00,840 --> 00:50:05,100 Now note the double deception in this new  marriage: husband Liu Liu believed that he was   527 00:50:05,100 --> 00:50:08,820 marrying a widow. He did not know that Xing  had in fact been living as Hong's wife and   528 00:50:08,820 --> 00:50:13,380 that Hong was alive, let alone that Xing had male  anatomy. So it was kind of a double deception here.   529 00:50:14,220 --> 00:50:22,080 Um on the wedding night, what happened? So Xing  covered up their bu bian chu, their inconvenient   530 00:50:22,080 --> 00:50:25,980 place, and told their new husband that because  of an illness they could not have vaginal   531 00:50:25,980 --> 00:50:31,320 intercourse and offered anal intercourse instead.  So Liu Liu believed the story and consummated their   532 00:50:31,320 --> 00:50:36,420 marriage by penetrating Xing anally and from then  on their conjugal relations always involved   533 00:50:36,420 --> 00:50:43,140 anal intercourse. Now two years later Xing Shi was visited in a dream by a Hu Xian, a fox spirit,   534 00:50:43,860 --> 00:50:47,040 who had chosen them to act as their  medium in order to cure women's illnesses. 535 00:50:49,380 --> 00:50:53,100 Xing announced this fact to their husband  and in-laws going into a trance of a fox   536 00:50:53,100 --> 00:50:56,100 could possess them and speak through  their mouth directly to the family.   537 00:50:56,940 --> 00:51:03,420 Much intimidated, Liu Liu acquiesced this plan,  he agreed, but his parents and brother were shocked   538 00:51:03,420 --> 00:51:09,360 and horrified and they forbade Xing Shi from  proceeding. So a route ensued with the fox spirit   539 00:51:09,360 --> 00:51:16,680 possessing possessing Xing Shi, causing a great deal of trouble, sort of trashing the house, and Xing Shi 540 00:51:16,680 --> 00:51:23,340 then compelled their husband to sever ties with  his family and move out to live on their own, so   541 00:51:23,340 --> 00:51:27,780 that Xing Shi could pursue their new vocation  as a spirit for medium and healer. Now it's   542 00:51:27,780 --> 00:51:32,280 interesting, from this point on Xing Shi was the  head of household, clearly in charge of the agenda,   543 00:51:32,280 --> 00:51:37,560 and Xing sure stopped having sex with husband Liu Liu at this point also, no more sex, and devoted himself   544 00:51:37,560 --> 00:51:42,420 entirely to serving the fox spirit and it's clear  that this new vocation is a medium empowered   545 00:51:42,420 --> 00:51:46,560 to Xing Shi in a way that transformed their  marriage and put them in charge of their husband.   546 00:51:47,460 --> 00:51:51,960 So as Xing Shi set up an altar in their home  with a spirit tablet and a painted image of the   547 00:51:51,960 --> 00:51:57,000 fox to worship, and when women fell ill and ask Xing to treat them, Xing would go to their home, burn   548 00:51:57,000 --> 00:52:02,400 incense, and channel the fox spirit, and then the  spirit would speak through Xing and question the   549 00:52:02,400 --> 00:52:06,060 patient and diagnose their malady and then  Xing Shi would come out of the trance and   550 00:52:06,060 --> 00:52:10,980 prepare a mixture of tea and other ingredients  as medicine for the patient to drink, and husband   551 00:52:10,980 --> 00:52:16,620 Liu Liu acted as their assistant. And for each  session of healing, Xing Shi received a couple of   552 00:52:16,620 --> 00:52:21,300 hundred cash, not a tremendous amount of money,  it's like a couple days wages for a laborer,   553 00:52:21,960 --> 00:52:25,860 and they had been practicing healing in  this manner for several years when arrested. 554 00:52:27,180 --> 00:52:30,716 But Xing Shi and Liu Liu absolutely denied having used 555 00:52:30,716 --> 00:52:33,617 Xing Shi's masquerade for the purpose of raping or seducing women.   556 00:52:34,380 --> 00:52:39,900 So the police who did this first interrogation  got this first confession, they reported this to   557 00:52:39,900 --> 00:52:44,220 the Xing Bu, the board of punishment, basically  up the chain of command, and they noted that they   558 00:52:44,220 --> 00:52:48,960 were very skeptical, they said "this is what they  say but we're skeptical," especially, A, that Xing 559 00:52:48,960 --> 00:52:55,440 and Liu never had sex had sex with women, and  B, that during their five years of marriage Liu   560 00:52:55,440 --> 00:53:00,120 had never realized that Xing was a man. So the  police suggested the board of punishment in the   561 00:53:00,120 --> 00:53:05,040 report that Liu must be an accomplice, not only in  the faith healing swindle but also in the gender   562 00:53:05,040 --> 00:53:10,500 masquerade and in seducing and raping women  and urged the two culprits be interrogated and 563 00:53:10,500 --> 00:53:16,320 severely punished. So the Board of Punishment takes  over the case and the presiding officials observe   564 00:53:16,320 --> 00:53:21,600 that for Xing Da "to pretend to channel a fox spirit, make a fake portrait of that spirit   565 00:53:21,600 --> 00:53:27,360 and to pretend to treat illnesses by looking at  incense, already constitute capital offenses," note   566 00:53:27,360 --> 00:53:31,980 their assumption this is all a fraud, this is not  real religion, this is not real faith healing, it's   567 00:53:31,980 --> 00:53:37,380 a fraud to swindle people all their money. But on  top of this Xing had "dared to dress his hair   568 00:53:37,380 --> 00:53:41,940 like a woman's and wear women's clothing, so it is  obvious that he must have used women for illicit   569 00:53:41,940 --> 00:53:47,820 sexual purposes." But Xing and Liu  persisted in their denials, so the examiners had   570 00:53:47,820 --> 00:53:52,500 them tortured with the ankle press the jia gun, which was the authorized torture instrument   571 00:53:52,500 --> 00:53:59,520 for men. And under torture, after some time they  changed their story in a couple of key ways, so   572 00:53:59,520 --> 00:54:05,820 a new confession. At first Xing had indeed tried  to conceal their sex from the Liu Liu and persuaded   573 00:54:05,820 --> 00:54:09,900 him to have anal instead of vaginal intercourse.  But within a few days as the two became more   574 00:54:09,900 --> 00:54:15,480 intimate, Liu discovered the truth. At first he  was very unhappy to find that his wife was a man,   575 00:54:15,480 --> 00:54:20,460 but Xing promised to serve him and support him  faithfully for the rest of their lives, and Liu 576 00:54:20,460 --> 00:54:28,320 finally acquiesced, and then Xing seduced him um  with his charming words and manner, and persuaded   577 00:54:28,320 --> 00:54:34,200 him into alternating sexual roles. So that they  would take turns penetrating each other sexually. 578 00:54:34,860 --> 00:54:39,360 and in this way "their sexual relations  became intense and passionate and they became   579 00:54:39,360 --> 00:54:42,720 devoted to each other's happiness  and spent every single night together." 580 00:54:43,440 --> 00:54:48,000 Now notice, this is a very  different story than the first confession right,   581 00:54:49,020 --> 00:54:54,360 um and in the first confession   both testified that once Xing began acting as a   582 00:54:54,360 --> 00:54:58,800 spirit medium, they stopped all sexual activity, but  also that Liu Liu never realized that his wife had   583 00:54:58,800 --> 00:55:04,800 male anatomy. So second the second way their story  change is that Xing Shi, with Liu Liu's help, had been   584 00:55:04,800 --> 00:55:08,940 operating a confidence scheme to cheat people out  of their money. The channeling of the fox spirit   585 00:55:08,940 --> 00:55:15,900 was simply a fraud, positioning that under in other  respects even under severe torture, they refused to   586 00:55:15,900 --> 00:55:20,820 change their story. Even under torture, according  to Xing, this is a summary by the Board   587 00:55:20,820 --> 00:55:25,140 of Punishment, "he began masquerading as a woman  because as a youth he was seduced into sodomy   588 00:55:25,140 --> 00:55:29,160 by Hong Da. This is not something he had planned  on doing himself as part of some scheme or plot.   589 00:55:30,120 --> 00:55:35,220 He insists he has never had sex with any woman  ever, and says that given everything else he has   590 00:55:35,220 --> 00:55:39,180 confessed, he would have no reason to conceal it  if he had done so, why would he endure torture in   591 00:55:39,180 --> 00:55:44,940 order to lie. So the board of punishment reported  to the emperor that they found this story unbelievable,   592 00:55:44,940 --> 00:55:49,200 but they said ultimately it's moot because  they had already confessed to other capital   593 00:55:49,200 --> 00:55:55,080 crimes, so instead of dragging this out, let's  just execute them. And so the Board closed the   594 00:55:55,080 --> 00:55:59,880 case and the emperor approved by sentencing  Xing to immediate strangulation, according to   595 00:55:59,880 --> 00:56:04,440 the heterodoxy statute. And as an accomplice,  Liu Liu was sentenced to military slavery. 596 00:56:05,820 --> 00:56:10,080 So I think I'm running out of time, but I have  a little bit more is it okay if I continue,   597 00:56:10,080 --> 00:56:17,100 I've got a bit more, um thank you. So there's a  common theme here, as I'm sure you've noticed, of   598 00:56:17,100 --> 00:56:24,420 um oops the common theme of just a moment about  fox spirit. So as you may know in Chinese religion,   599 00:56:24,420 --> 00:56:28,680 especially in north China, you have the Si Da Men, these are the four animal households of these   600 00:56:28,680 --> 00:56:32,940 animal spirits that are worshiped by people.  Um the fox, weasel, hedgehog and snake, with the   601 00:56:32,940 --> 00:56:37,500 fox being most important and powerful. And  these deities are shape-shifters they can   602 00:56:37,500 --> 00:56:42,180 appear in human form or an animal form, they  are accessed through spirit mediums usually   603 00:56:42,180 --> 00:56:50,460 women, especially the fox is usually a woman, and the Hu Xian Niang Niang, the most popular version of the fox spirit, has   604 00:56:50,460 --> 00:56:56,700 powerful power to heal illnesses, usually female  illnesses, and and her mediums are women, and this   605 00:56:56,700 --> 00:57:01,320 religion is alive and well in China. Here's here are two modern images of Hu Xian Niang Niang. 606 00:57:01,320 --> 00:57:07,260 She also is seen as one who can bring good  fortune to families, bring wealth and so on um. 607 00:57:10,560 --> 00:57:16,500 So common theme here. Again,  healing and spirit possession.   608 00:57:16,500 --> 00:57:23,040 All three of these individuals, Xiong Mumu practiced midwifery,  Zhang Yaoguniang summoned a spirit for faith healing, and   609 00:57:23,040 --> 00:57:27,360 Xing Shi channeled fox spirit for healing  right. All of them engaged in healing work. 610 00:57:29,400 --> 00:57:36,120 So the authorities portrayed the faith healing  as a fraud right as a confidence scheme, 611 00:57:36,120 --> 00:57:39,480 but if we set aside the official  prejudices the details extracted   612 00:57:39,480 --> 00:57:43,020 under torture, it seems obvious there must  have been oh please don't mess that up, 613 00:57:46,860 --> 00:57:50,400 um if we set aside official prejudices  and the details especially extracted under   614 00:57:50,400 --> 00:57:54,360 torture, it seems obvious there must be some  connection between their transing of gender   615 00:57:54,360 --> 00:57:59,580 and their ability to engage in these healing  activities. If you think about it, both midwifery,  616 00:58:00,120 --> 00:58:04,320 that's the delivery of children into  this world, and the shamanistic power   617 00:58:04,320 --> 00:58:09,180 to channel spirits, both of them involve a  highly potent crossing of boundaries, with   618 00:58:09,180 --> 00:58:13,800 powerfully gendered and symbolic implications  and also both involve great risk right.   619 00:58:14,580 --> 00:58:19,320 So Xing Shi's channeling of the fox spirit is  the most intriguing example, it's also the best   620 00:58:19,320 --> 00:58:23,940 document, I have the most information about that  one. Fox spirits have this rich role in Chinese   621 00:58:23,940 --> 00:58:29,820 popular religion and folklore, which I just talked  about. All of these spirits were accessed through   622 00:58:29,820 --> 00:58:34,920 spirit mediums who practiced healing divination  and exorcism exorcism, they were capricious spirits   623 00:58:34,920 --> 00:58:39,240 they could cause mischief, but if they were  properly propitiated, they could also do good. 624 00:58:40,200 --> 00:58:45,840 And the fox is portrayed as the maternal deity, uh Hu Xian Niang Niang. 625 00:58:45,840 --> 00:58:50,760 Most mediums who channeled foxes  were poor-married women, living   626 00:58:50,760 --> 00:58:54,240 at the bottom of the social scale  ah excellent we're back, thank you. 627 00:58:57,540 --> 00:59:02,700 But these women typically were respected in  their own communities for their healing services   628 00:59:03,540 --> 00:59:08,640 and hence it's not perhaps surprising  that the fox spirit served as a tutelary 629 00:59:08,640 --> 00:59:13,800 deity for Xing Shi, or that Xing Shi was  able to act as a medium for such a spirit. 630 00:59:16,140 --> 00:59:20,400 Despite their torture-driven confession  of fraud, Xing Shi's account of their work,  631 00:59:20,400 --> 00:59:26,280 with a fox spirit closely matches the evidence  gathered in 20th century ethnography accounts,   632 00:59:26,280 --> 00:59:30,780 both in the early 20th century and again in  the post-Mao era by scholars doing field work   633 00:59:30,780 --> 00:59:35,760 in rural north China, including the immediate  environs of Beijing, where this case took place.   634 00:59:36,360 --> 00:59:39,300 And it seems to me most likely  Xing Shi's vocation was genuine,   635 00:59:40,260 --> 00:59:45,180 and Xing Shi's religious vocation also recalls  the tradition in other Chinese religious sects of   636 00:59:45,180 --> 00:59:50,100 male mediums who channel female deities and vice  versa, during which they undergo a temporary change   637 00:59:50,100 --> 00:59:55,860 of gender by adopting the mannerisms, speaking  in the voice of the deity. We're also reminded   638 00:59:55,860 --> 01:00:01,200 of the special sacred qualities and ritual rules  attributed to gender-variant individuals in some   639 01:00:01,200 --> 01:00:05,700 other cultures as a sort of a worldwide pattern  you can find. In Native American cultures they're   640 01:00:05,700 --> 01:00:11,820 the people who are sometimes called two-spirit; in  South Asia you have the hijras, both have important   641 01:00:12,420 --> 01:00:18,420 um and honorable religious roles. Imperial authorities and Confucian elites viewed all of   642 01:00:18,420 --> 01:00:24,780 these popular religious sects with great suspicion. They often condemn them as heterodox, even though   643 01:00:24,780 --> 01:00:28,800 as a practical matter it was impossible to  suppress animal worship in these things or   644 01:00:28,800 --> 01:00:35,280 spirit mediumship. One of the stock accusations  leveled at so-called heterodox sex Xie Jiao, was that   645 01:00:35,280 --> 01:00:39,360 they violated the proper separation of sexes by  allowing men and women to mingle indiscriminately.   646 01:00:40,020 --> 01:00:44,760 There's a separate tradition in literary discourse  that demonizes the fox spirit as a dangerous   647 01:00:44,760 --> 01:00:50,580 malevolent being,a shape-shifting sexual vampire,  who takes the form of a beautiful young woman in   648 01:00:50,580 --> 01:00:57,000 order to seduce unsuspecting men and drain them  of their semen, their life force. This malevolent   649 01:00:57,000 --> 01:01:04,500 fox spirit reminds us a bit of the shape-shifting sorcerer Sang Chong, but Sang Chong pursued chased women right 650 01:01:04,500 --> 01:01:10,260 that's the paradigm we're dealing with here. The literary  paradigm of the malevolent fox spirit, supposedly   651 01:01:10,260 --> 01:01:15,480 preys upon healthy young men, maybe a projection  by the literati who wrote that kind of fiction. 652 01:01:16,140 --> 01:01:22,260 And this image of the sexual vampire fox appears  to be a feature of literati discourse that has   653 01:01:22,260 --> 01:01:28,200 no bearing on actual religious practice or belief  among rural people. The actual religion of the fox   654 01:01:28,200 --> 01:01:33,840 spirit does not have this sexual vampire image,  that's a product of like Zhi Guai Xiao Shuo and that kind   655 01:01:33,840 --> 01:01:39,960 of thing. At any rate, Xing Shi is channeling  of heterodox fox spirit, certainly confirmed the   656 01:01:39,960 --> 01:01:44,100 already strong prejudice against gender crossing  held by the authorities, who condemned her in fact   657 01:01:44,100 --> 01:01:49,500 their transing of gender may have enhanced their  ability for this ritual role as two extraordinary   658 01:01:49,500 --> 01:01:54,600 abilities that paralleled and confirmed each other. Xing's male body already served as a vessel for   659 01:01:54,600 --> 01:02:00,000 a woman's persona, it seems a logical next step  for it to serve as a vehicle for a female spirit   660 01:02:00,000 --> 01:02:05,580 to make itself manifest in the world. Possession  by the fox would in turn have confirmed Xingshi 661 01:02:05,580 --> 01:02:10,500 in their role as a woman, but it also clearly  empowered them vis-a-vis, both their family and   662 01:02:10,500 --> 01:02:15,120 their community, making them a figure of authority  who dominated their husband. So we can speculate   663 01:02:15,120 --> 01:02:19,680 that being coming a medium may have completed Xingshi and helped give them the confidence to take   664 01:02:19,680 --> 01:02:24,840 command of their life, really, for the first time, after years of being controlled by and objectified   665 01:02:24,840 --> 01:02:31,200 and abused by male sexual partners. Now I should  emphasize there's no way for us to know for sure   666 01:02:31,200 --> 01:02:35,820 the subjective consciousness or perception of  these people who lived as women at enormous   667 01:02:35,820 --> 01:02:41,460 risk, whose gender-crossing eventually attracted  the malign attention of the Qing authorities.   668 01:02:42,300 --> 01:02:47,220 I think it's clear though, there was a huge gap  between these individuals motives and desires,   669 01:02:48,120 --> 01:02:53,580 separating those motives and desires from the  straight jacket of official expectations, obsessed   670 01:02:53,580 --> 01:02:58,680 by the paradigm of the cross-dressing predator.  That paranoid fantasy attempted to make sense of   671 01:02:58,680 --> 01:03:03,300 a gender performance that radically conflicted  with normative masculinity. An ulterior motive   672 01:03:03,300 --> 01:03:08,760 explained: it the apparent embrace of femininity  was in fact a disguise, for that definitive form   673 01:03:08,760 --> 01:03:15,060 of dangerous masculinity, the aggressive penetrator,  who respects no ritual boundaries. So behind this   674 01:03:15,060 --> 01:03:20,220 veil of feminine artifice, Qing officials believed  they saw the all too easily comprehensible threat   675 01:03:20,220 --> 01:03:26,280 of male sexual aggression. Ultimately then, the  cross-dressing predator reflects anxiety less   676 01:03:26,280 --> 01:03:30,720 about gender inversion per se than about the  vulnerability of chaste daughters and wives.  677 01:03:31,800 --> 01:03:38,820 Now I realize I'm over time, but I have a bit  of a coda about the contemporary scene is it   678 01:03:38,820 --> 01:03:45,780 okay, I mean, forgive me, I I got off on a tangent  okay. So in Asia today although perhaps I should   679 01:03:45,780 --> 01:03:52,080 say before COVID, before the latest wave of  policies under Xi Jinping, um which seemed to   680 01:03:52,080 --> 01:03:58,620 be rigidifying gender roles once again. There is  or was a flourishing male to female transculture. 681 01:03:58,620 --> 01:04:03,480 This culture features a certain refashioning and  reinvention of traditional themes that circulate   682 01:04:03,480 --> 01:04:07,200 transnationally between within greater  China, but also in Thailand for example.   683 01:04:07,920 --> 01:04:13,080 So in China what's interesting is that the renyao, this term has become slang for a conventionally   684 01:04:13,080 --> 01:04:19,620 beautiful and glamorous trans woman. I should say  it's also a term of abuse for gay men but what   685 01:04:19,620 --> 01:04:24,120 I'm talking about today is this conventionally  beautiful and glamorous trans woman. So if you   686 01:04:24,120 --> 01:04:28,920 do a Google search of the term renyao in Chinese,  it'll turn up many many stories and images related   687 01:04:28,920 --> 01:04:35,400 to this, especially trans women from Thailand, where  an M-to-F transgender culture is especially mainstream,   688 01:04:35,400 --> 01:04:42,720 focusing on high profile beauty pageants, such  as Miss Tiffany's uniforms, universe. So this   689 01:04:42,720 --> 01:04:48,120 scene has attracted much fascinated attention in  China and drag and trans women beauty pageants are   690 01:04:48,120 --> 01:04:52,680 now also performed in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and  they were in the PRC until fairly recently.   691 01:04:53,280 --> 01:04:58,080 So in other words the renyao is no longer a  dangerous predator who targets chaste women,   692 01:04:58,800 --> 01:05:04,440 instead she is a ren zao mei nu - an artificial  beautiful woman - that's the term of art, 693 01:05:05,100 --> 01:05:11,940 who performs to delight the male gaze. So the  focus is the glamorous trans woman as performer   694 01:05:12,480 --> 01:05:21,180 and she generally conforms the bai-shou-mei ideal  right, the fair-skinned, thin, and pretty ideal. So   695 01:05:21,180 --> 01:05:28,380 the most famous trans woman in China is Jin Xing,  who until relatively recently was a celebrity on   696 01:05:28,380 --> 01:05:32,760 TV and so she's been kicked off TV and suppressed  now. She doesn't fit in anymore apparently.   697 01:05:33,840 --> 01:05:40,620 But she's probably the most famous trans woman in  China. There are others there's Liu Shihan, who is a   698 01:05:40,620 --> 01:05:48,420 fashion model, has quite a package of endorsements.  So all of them are performers or entertainers   699 01:05:48,420 --> 01:05:53,940 of some kind fashion models, actors, dancers,  talk show hosts, um it's saying that Liu Yifei, 700 01:05:53,940 --> 01:06:02,340 who as far as I know is not trans, but she has been  persistently rumored to have gone to America and   701 01:06:02,340 --> 01:06:11,820 she's actually a trans woman. She actually had to  deny this publicly and now you have the si da hua dan. This   702 01:06:11,820 --> 01:06:17,400 used to refer to male performers of female roles,  now it refers to beautiful young starlets right.   703 01:06:17,400 --> 01:06:24,540 And this makes me wonder, whether achieving this  bai-shou-mei ideal to such a high degree is assumed   704 01:06:24,540 --> 01:06:28,560 to require so much artifice the transgender is  automatically included as part of the equation.   705 01:06:29,340 --> 01:06:34,860 Now the most famous Thai trans woman who's a  celebrity in China, or at least used to be, Treechada   706 01:06:34,860 --> 01:06:41,640 Petcharat, also known as Poyd or baoer in Chinese. She  has a considerable following in Greater China, she   707 01:06:41,640 --> 01:06:48,360 has started a number of Chinese films based in  Hong Kong, including a horror-thriller called   708 01:06:48,360 --> 01:06:57,120 Yaoyi - the English title is Witch Doctor, and um this plays on traditional Chinese   709 01:06:57,120 --> 01:07:02,040 tropes of the randomly encountered beautiful woman  being a potential sexual vampire, but also on the   710 01:07:02,040 --> 01:07:06,540 Hollywood show of the trans women as a potential  serial killer. So this is a kind of mishmash of   711 01:07:06,540 --> 01:07:11,580 all these traditional but kind of Western and  modern tropes altogether. And these commentary I   712 01:07:11,580 --> 01:07:21,126 just sort of pulled this off the web, this is like this passionate fevered commentary: [speaks Chinese] 713 01:07:21,126 --> 01:07:22,380 And then this one is interesting: [speaks Chinese] 714 01:07:22,380 --> 01:07:34,260 So even straight men might become gay right,  and has even more feminine flavor than a   715 01:07:34,260 --> 01:07:39,000 real woman. So if you look at this commentary, the  underlying premise is that this is really a man,   716 01:07:40,080 --> 01:07:45,900 who through artifice is performing as a  female, and even better than a woman. So I   717 01:07:45,900 --> 01:07:49,920 mean and then here's more fevered commentary we  don't need to go into, this it's more of the same   718 01:07:51,120 --> 01:07:57,240 um and here we have this one generation - there are  multiple generations of these - and here we have Liu 719 01:07:57,240 --> 01:08:03,960 Yifei, rumored. As far as I know it's not true, but who  knows, even the fox spirit you have this sort of   720 01:08:03,960 --> 01:08:08,700 glamorous version of the fox spirit now, which  strikes me as sort of the same bai-shou-mei right. 721 01:08:10,200 --> 01:08:18,360 Um and so what am I getting at here um, this  reinvented renyao was no longer a hyper masculine   722 01:08:18,360 --> 01:08:22,800 predator who threatens the chastity of women  right, instead she seems to evoke invoke the idea   723 01:08:22,800 --> 01:08:27,780 of something fundamentally different, masquerading  as a beautiful woman in order to be witchman. She   724 01:08:27,780 --> 01:08:32,700 represents in this fantasy ideal, the performance  of a certain kind of feminine artifice aimed at   725 01:08:32,700 --> 01:08:38,040 seducing the male gaze, at satisfying  male possessive desire, and in this respect,   726 01:08:38,040 --> 01:08:44,460 she recalls the Qing Dynasty elite idealization of  the actor, who played female roles as the epitomy   727 01:08:44,460 --> 01:08:49,740 of feminine beauty, is superior to anything that  a real woman, a mere woman, could perform. So like   728 01:08:49,740 --> 01:08:54,360 the Dan, this version of the trans woman's  allure depends precisely on their audience's   729 01:08:54,360 --> 01:08:58,440 awareness that they are not a cisgendered  woman right, but rather, they are performing   730 01:08:58,440 --> 01:09:04,800 an ideal femininity achieved through artifice. And  again, this is like the Dan [speaks Chinese] right. 731 01:09:05,580 --> 01:09:09,900 In both cases it seems to me, this kind of  trans erotic allure is grounded in misogyny   732 01:09:10,680 --> 01:09:16,740 upon the part of those who are appreciating it  and it is these qualities in the Qing that made   733 01:09:16,740 --> 01:09:22,560 cross-dressing on stage safe and acceptable. It is  also this quality I think that makes trans women   734 01:09:22,560 --> 01:09:27,660 acceptable in Greater China today. Everyone  understood that Dan rule to be temporary,   735 01:09:27,660 --> 01:09:31,920 moreover boy actors were owned by their masters,  their performance was not an exercise of choice.  736 01:09:32,760 --> 01:09:38,820 For individuals assigned male at birth in the  Qing Dynasty to choose to live as women as a   737 01:09:38,820 --> 01:09:43,800 transgressive act of self-determination, that was  an entirely different matter and Qing authorities   738 01:09:43,800 --> 01:09:48,480 can imagine no benign explanation or context  for that kind of behavior, which they saw as   739 01:09:48,480 --> 01:09:54,540 self-debasing. In their eyes, that was a dangerous  malevolent fraud and so in China today, gender   740 01:09:54,540 --> 01:10:01,800 crossing seems to be accepted and celebrated,  only insofar as it appeals to the male gaze in   741 01:10:01,800 --> 01:10:07,560 conformance with conventional standards of beauty  and femininity. In effect, this reinforces those   742 01:10:07,560 --> 01:10:12,240 conventional standards. There are plenty of actual  trans people who don't fit that image at all right.   743 01:10:13,320 --> 01:10:18,480 Um so in contrast with the ideal, trans women  who failed to meet conventional standards of   744 01:10:18,480 --> 01:10:24,300 beauty are invisible, as are trans men and in  the new transgender glamor culture, there are   745 01:10:24,300 --> 01:10:29,820 no heroic celebrity trans men that I know of  right. So it's a particular subset. Anyway I'm   746 01:10:29,820 --> 01:10:35,843 all done I'm sorry to go on so long, but that's  that's what I've got, so thank you! [Applause]