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

In imperial China, people moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth in different ways and for many reasons. Eunuchs, boy actresses, and clergy left behind normative gender roles defined by family and procreation. “Stone maidens”—women deemed physically incapable of vaginal intercourse—might depart from families or marriages to become Buddhist or Daoist nuns. Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupation such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit. Yet they were often punished harshly for the crime of “masquerading in women’s attire,” suspected of sexual predation, even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for many years.Exploring these histories and many more, this book is a groundbreaking study of transgender lives and practices in late imperial China. Through close readings of court cases, as well as Ming and Qing fiction and nineteenth-century newspaper accounts, Matthew H. Sommer examines the social, legal, and cultural histories of gender crossing. He considers a range of transgender experiences, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular social contexts and penalized in others. Sommer scrutinizes the ways Qing legal authorities and literati writers represented and understood gender-nonconforming people and practices, contrasting official ideology with popular mentalities. An unprecedented account of China’s transgender histories, this book also sheds new light on a range of themes in Ming and Qing law, religion, medicine, literature, and culture.

Matthew Sommer makes splendid use of contemporary transgender theory to shed light upon, and gain new insight into, late imperial Chinese society. Far from anachronistically imposing a presentist category on the radical difference of the past, Sommer examines a variety of individual cases in which manifold practices of gender-crossing allow previously underappreciated aspects of law, religion, literature, and social order to click into focus with startling clarity., In equal measure theoretically informed and richly documented, Matthew Sommer’s newest book centers around six cases of male-to-female cross-dressers or intersex commoners in Qing China who eventually get caught up in legal altercations. Sommer’s definition of transgender is broad—essentially anyone living outside Confucian familial norms—comprising a continuum from monks who “left the family,” to eunuchs, cross-dressing actors, intersex brides, and those who “passed” male for female (until they were outed), many of whom met a violent end. Charting the fear that those who engaged in trans practices must have harbored nefarious motives, all the while suggesting that such lifestyles were much more common and accepted in everyday life than we might imagine, this provocative historicization of transgendering in late imperial China is at once both universal and deeply particular. Its lucid prose should make this study accessible well beyond the China field.

Matthew H. Sommer is the Bowman Family Professor of History at Stanford University. He is the author of Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (2000) and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions (2015).