Organizer: Kimberly Besio, Colby College
Chair and Discussant: Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota
During the late Ming, qing (sentiment) and yu (sexual desire) functioned as a central discursive site for a re envisioning of the Neo-Confucian ideal of the rational self. Within Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism qing was regarded as dangerously subjective and too closely identified with yu. In contrast to the reservations expressed by the period's more orthodox thinkers, many of the major figures associated with the production of literature in the late Ming and Qing celebrated qing as an authentic form of self expression vital to life and even moral action. In their various literary enterprises these proponents of qing intentionally elided and obscured the thin semantic line that distinguished pure sentiment from polluting sexuality. The papers in this double panel will trace the way these contested terms are inscribed and re inscribed onto texts in a range of literary genres. Together, the papers will explore the complex and fluid relationships between terms such as qing, yu, and se to ask how these shifts in meaning reflected the preoccupations of those who wrote, edited, commented upon, and read literature.
The papers center on interplay between sentiment and sexual desire in literary texts. Ann Waltner, a Ming historian who is interested in social, intellectual, and gender issues, will comment. In her discussion of the Ming novel Jin Ping Mei, Naifei Ding deconstructs Zhang Zhupo's method of reading (dufa) as a process whereby an ideal male reader transubstantiates excessive desire into a moral self-fashioning, by projecting it onto an obscene text. Maram Epstein discusses the use of the materiality of bodies in (porno)graphic texts and explores how the repressed sexual desire of the male author and implied male readers is displaced onto the female body. Giovanni Vitiello considers the thematic interrelationships between dream, journey, and (homo)erotic experience in a late Ming novella; he concludes that in this novella desire represents a "possible route to spiritual emancipation." Finally, Sophie Volpp focuses on the role of language in inscribing sexuality in her reconsideration of relationships between boy actors and literati portrayed in seventeenth century texts. Ding and Epstein focus on depictions of the female body; Vitiello and Volpp center on the male. Yet all the participants are similarly engaged in tracing how desire was inscribed-onto the texts, onto bodies within the texts, and in some cases onto the readers themselves.
Maram Epstein, University of Oregon
As recent discussions of the body in traditional Chinese culture have argued, the materiality of the physical body was largely eclipsed by the attention given to the cultural matrices which articulated the social self. Yet bodies were important markers of social control: early penal codes used tattooing and mutilation; male loyalty to the Manchu court was embodied in the queue. The invisibility of elite women was another sign of social order. The social body, produced through the enactment of ritual, provides the site upon which social order is realized; in fiction, the materiality of the body often reveals the limits of social control. In my readings of late Ming and Qing vernacular fiction, I have been struck by the (porno)graphic insistence on the materiality of the female body, especially the frequent narrative attention given to bodily effluvia, an aspect of the body that defies clear boundaries. Unlike the male body which was properly situated in public, the exposure of elite women's bodies was inherently transgressive because it threatened the integrity of the boundary distinguishing nei from wai.
The graphic sexual descriptions in late imperial fiction though sexually titillating are suffused by a pervasive anxiety about the loss of order and control. I link this ambivalence to the orthodox Neo Confucian discourse on self cultivation, which simultaneously posits desire as part of the material nature but antithetical to the realization of the rational nature. In Shuihu zhuan, suppressed male sexuality is violently etched onto the naked bodies of adulterous women. In Chanzhen yishi and Xingshi yinyuan zhuan, polluting menstrual blood interrupts male desire and transfers the narrative focus away from the male protagonist onto the body of the woman. I discuss these and other examples to argue that the intensified anxiety about desire within Neo Confucian discourse is graphically revealed in the ways the male self is distanced from desire, while the female body is constructed as the "natural" site upon which male desire is displaced and inscribed.
Naifei Ding, National Central University, Chungli, Taiwan
I propose in this paper to examine how lessons in becoming-Man, and simultaneously, becoming-Moral, are inscribed both literally and figuratively onto/through the dead bodies of the late Ming "obscene" fiction Jin Ping Mei Cihua (Wan li edition), and Zhang Zhupo's minutely commented version (re inscription) of a later edition of Jin Ping Mei. I will read, as minutely and in detail (as Zhang Zhupo), certain episodes from these two texts, and argue that they form a textual and sexual apprenticeship; an apprenticeship for a projected "ideal" reader whose desiring formation can be traced within these texts, both in the narrative itself, and in its later renditions, rewritings and commentaries. More precisely, I will try to reread and retrace the formation of a particular reading subject and "his" desire in/through the texts that narrate the serial deaths of licentious women. How such a reading subject is articulated precisely through the writing of "oversexed" dead and dying women; how this subject comes to be implicated, invested, in these textual "killings"; what is at stake, in terms of libidinal and moral interests, for this particular reading subject, in such a process of reading/becoming; these are the questions that I ask and try to answer.
I am especially interested in how a projected reading subject and reading process constitute an integral part of fictional writing. And how that subject and that process may, as is the case with the two Jin Ping Mei texts, leave traces, within the narrative text, in its rewriting, in its linear and marginal commentary; traces of readerly desire, of corporeal response.
For Zhang Zhupo, what enables and justifies and indeed, demands, the writing of a "reader's guide" to the JPM, is on the one hand the resentment he identifies as the motivating force for a "sublime" writing, and which likewise motivates his reading, and on the other hand, the certainty of "purification" and "enlightenment" through a process of reading, whereby is induced a series of bodily, psycho somatic reaction-banging on a spittoon, hacking about with a sword, drinking lustily of wine-that may both displace and discharge, in another guise, the "bellyful of outraged tears" (his words) that cannot be shed.
What do Zhang Zhupo's unshed tears have to do with Pan Jinlian's disemboweled entrails, and disembodied head? With Li Ping'er's uterine hemorrhage, her slow bleeding to death? With Song Huilian's swinging herself to death using feet wraps to hang herself from the neck rather than from the ankles (a usage and position much favored by Ximen Qing when copulating with licentious women)?
It is precisely such connections, amongst and between bodies and emotions, tears, semen and blood, writings and readings, that I think sustains the misogyny of the JPM in its various versions. Vital connections that enable a (male) reading subject to seek magical separation and moral survival from feminine forces fantasized, narrativized, then expelled, not forever, but again and again, never enough or so it would seem for the sanctity of this particular yang/male body.
Giovanni Vitiello, University of California, Berkeley
The subject of this paper is the fourth and final novella of Yichun xiangzhi (Fragrant Stuff from the Court of Spring). This collection, never previously studied, is one of the few extant late Ming homoerotica. It was written by Zui Xihu Xinyue Zhuren (The West Lake Crazed Master Moon Heart), also the author of another collection on the same topic, Bian er chai (Cap and Hairpins). The novella under consideration can be defined as a "dream illusion" (menghuan). It tells the story of a young man who, in a dream, is able to articulate the previously unknown universe of his desires, and journey through them. His dream consists of a process of knowledge of desire that eventually leads him to realize its vacuity.
In my analysis I will focus on the thematic interrelation between dream, journey, and the erotic experience. I will attempt to relate the representation of sexuality emerging from the story with the late Ming sexual culture, in order to assess, in particular, the place male homosexuality occupied in it. I show how Master Moon Heart's discourse on male homosexuality is as concerned with sentiment as it is with sex. I will finally discuss the notion of desire as an instrument of self knowledge and, as such, as a possible route to spiritual emancipation, pointing out the connection between the erotic discourse in late Ming pornography and the contemporaneous philosophical reappraisal of feelings (qing) and desire (yu).
Sophie Volpp, Harvard University
In this paper I discuss the representation of the boy actor in biji (commonplace books) and in the poems of Qian Qianyi, Chen Weisong, Wu Meicun, Gong Dingzi, Wang Shizhen and Mao Xiang, some of the most famous lyricists of the seventeenth century. I will set up my discussion by reconstructing the cultural milieu in which these poems were written, describing the purchase and training of actors, and the similarities and differences between the functions that courtesans and male actors served. The poems document the social exchanges of this set of literati libertines, commemorating performances, mourning actors' deaths, celebrating renewed acquaintances with actors and lamenting subsequent partings. While these poems are often complex literary jokes, they are also a source of historical information, and can be used to modify commonly held assumptions about the erotic relationships between literati and actors. For example, a common notion is that these relationships were between older protectors and boy actors. In these texts, it becomes apparent that the most cherished among these actors appealed to several generations of scholars over time. It also becomes clear that contrary to popular conception, these actors were literate, and engaged in exchanges of poems with literati. Almost none of the poems by actors, however, have survived.
In my analysis I focus on the inscription of gender and sexuality in these poems. I concentrate on poems written about two actors, one a lover of the lyricist Chen Weisong, one a protégé of Gong Dingzi. Both are consistently described as feminine beauties; various allusions refer to them as consorts and courtesans. Previous studies have concluded that homoerotic liaisons between actors and literati were conceptually located within the hetero gender system because of the fact that actors engaged in such liaisons are described as women. I intend to re examine this assumption based on my analysis of these texts.
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