Organizer and Chair: Robert Hymes, Columbia University
Joyce X.Y. Wang, University of California, Santa Cruz
As one of the four masterpieces of late Qing fiction, The Travels of Laocan has been discussed widely for its literary excellence, its story telling skills, and most importantly, its scathing political satire. Less noticed has been the novel's stance towards women. Unlike most other Ming and Qing novels in which women achieve better treatment through an act of male charity, The Travels of Laocan shows women gaining independence through their own efforts. The episode involving Yiyun, the Taoist nun who travels the path from erotic awakening to spiritual enlightenment, is the most notable example of a woman's self transformation in the novel.
The attitudes toward women of certain male characters undergo self-critique. The central character, Laocan, and two of his friends express shame regarding male treachery and decadence and empathy towards female suffering. The novel, while written within a Confucian framework, has a subtext that brings into question the equity of male/female relationships of its day.
Dominique Ryon, University of Montreal
Dongba writing system was a sacred script used by specialists of the Dongba religion, the traditional shamanic religion of the Naxi people of China. More than twenty thousand manuscripts have been written with this script which was still in use at the beginning of the twentieth century.
For decades, the origin of this script has been a controversial issue in Naxi studies. The aim of this paper is to shade a new light on this question as it raises methodological problems and draws a connection between the origin of this script and the dramatic social changes which occurred in this community at the beginning of the eighteen century (the colonization by the Han people (1723) and the spread of a male ideology in a matrilineal social context).
Tze-lan D. Sang, University of California, Berkeley
In this paper, I re think the idea that lesbianism was not as tabooed in China as in the Christian West via a careful reading of a story from Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhi yi-"Feng Sanniang." My work is motivated in part by my dissatisfaction with certain idealizations that Robert van Gulik makes in his pioneering study of sexual culture in traditional Chinese societies, Sexual Life in Ancient China. Van Gulik maintains that sapphism was tolerated and sometimes even encouraged in the traditional Chinese polygamous household, that it was considered 1) harmless because women have an unlimited supply of yin fluids and 2) inevitable, since women were obliged to live in close quarters sharing only one legitimate male sexual partner. What is clearly missing from van Gulik's consideration is the questions whether it is adequate to understand "sapphism" in traditional China only in terms of circumstantial necessity (i.e. as a substitute for heterosexual intercourse) and never in terms of preference, whether there was tolerance for sapphism that could not be accommodated by the polygamous arrangement, and what happened when sapphists refused to be accommodated by male centered polygamy. It is significant that such questions do not even arise for van Gulik as he tries to understand the attitude taken towards lesbianism in traditional Chinese sexual culture(s). He shows indifference to radically transgressive forms of female sexuality.
Unlike Li Yu's well known Loving the Fragrant Companion, which van Gulik regards as a brilliant play of sapphism and in which the female protagonists in love with each other manage to live together by marrying the same man, Pu Songling's story of female female love, "Feng Sanniang," does not have the happy ending of a threesome. Sanniang, one of the female lovers in the story, refuses to marry her beloved's husband. After being raped by him, Sanniang condemns the conspiracy and violence against herself, expressing her desire to avoid ever having sexual intercourse in a Daoist rhetoric of self cultivation for achieving longevity. A queer subtext, however, subtends her refusal of man: she is the "lesbian" unwilling to compromise with compulsory heterosexuality.
This is not to say that Pu Songling's story simply extols an exclusive lesbian identity. Its discourse on female female love is rather ambiguous and ambivalent. Sanniang's intimacy with her friend is never regarded as sexual, but simply as a matter of feelings. As Sanniang is a fox spirit rather than an authentic human, the radicalism in her love for a woman is sidetracked into the question of species crossing. It is as if once the monstrosity of lesbians were literalized in the body of a fox, the transgressiveness of their sentiments were lessened. In the end Sanniang rejects her own love as a misleading, albeit powerful, illusion. The unique story illustrates both the sublimity and implausibility of exclusive lesbian commitment in a polygamous, patriarchal society.
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