Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China / / Martin W. Huang.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Asian Studies Backlist (2000-2014) eBook Package
• VerfasserIn: Huang, Martin W.,
• Place / Publishing House: Honolulu : : University of Hawaii Press, , [2006]; ©2006
• Year of Publication: 2006
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (336 p.)

Why did traditional Chinese literati so often identify themselves with women in their writing? What can this tell us about how they viewed themselves as men and how they understood masculinity? How did their attitudes in turn shape the martial heroes and other masculine models they constructed? Martin Huang attempts to answer these questions in this valuable work on manhood in late imperial China. He focuses on the ambivalent and often paradoxical role played by women and the feminine in the intricate negotiating process of male gender identity in late imperial cultural discourses. Two common strategies for constructing and negotiating masculinity were adopted in many of the works examined here.The first, what Huang calls the strategy of analogy, constructs masculinity in close association with the feminine; the second, the strategy of differentiation, defines it in sharp contrast to the feminine. In both cases women bear the burden as the defining "other." In this study,"feminine" is a rather broad concept denoting a wide range of gender phenomena associated with women, from the politically and socially destabilizing to the exemplary wives and daughters celebrated in Confucian chastity discourse.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Part 1. Engendering the Loyal Minister -- 1. From True Man to Castrato: Early Models and Later Ramifications -- 2. From Faithful Wife to Whore: The Minister-Concubine Complex in Ming Politics -- 3. The Case of Xu Wei: A Frustrated Hero or a Weeping Widow? -- 4. Manhood and Nationhood: Chaste Women and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty -- Part 2. Heroes and Other Competing Models -- 5. From Yingxiong to Haohan: Models of Masculinity in San'guo yanyi and Shuihu zhuan -- 6. Reconstructing Haohan in Three Novels from the Sui-Tang Romance Cycle -- 7. Effeminacy, Femininity, and Male-Male Passions -- 8. Romantic Heroes in Yesou puyan and Sanfen meng quanzhuan -- Part 3. What a Man Ought to Be -- 9. Ideals and Fears in Prescriptive Literature -- Epilogue: Masculinity and Modernity -- Notes -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author