Organizer and Chair: Stephen F. Teiser, Princeton University
Discussant: Anthony C. Yü, University of Chicago
Until recently the standard vision of the Chinese family system portrayed its primary virtue as xiao ("filial piety"), the duties owed to fathers by sons. In that view, perpetrated by both Chinese rhetoric and academic analysis, sons were supposed to honor their living parents, bring wives into the family and produce sons, reflect glory on the patrilineage, and eventually assume their place as a venerated ancestor. Drawing inspiration from prior criticisms of this model in gender studies and anthropology. this panel offers further suggestions for rethinking Chinese kinship by focusing on the relationship between mothers and sons. Chosen from a variety of disciplinary approaches. the papers reveal the importance of social bonds denigrated by Confucian rationalizing and demonstrate how unfilial passions were constructed at the heart of the Chinese family system.
Cole's paper outlines the way in which Buddhism, a religion tainted in Chinese eyes by the institution of a celibate monkhood, redefined filial piety in Tang apocryphal texts. Focusing on the role of women in kinship rituals, Sangren argues that the power of women in the domestic sphere is converted symbolically into the production of collectivities controlled by men. Hsiung investigates the dynamics of the later stages of the mother-son relationship in late imperial times. Volpp uses homoerotic relationships in which men dress and behave as mothers as portrayed in seventeenth-century short stories to reflect on the relationship between mothers and sons. Yü, whose recent work includes study of "family instructions" (jiaxun), will act as discussant.
Buddhist Filial Piety in the Tang: The Mother and Son Romance
Alan Cole, Lewis and Clark College
From the earliest period, Chinese Buddhists had to face the problem of interacting with the traditional Chinese family. To build a circuit of exchange, Buddhist authors forged numerous texts that encouraged patronage for the monasteries by creating a set of filial debts to the mother which could only be resolved with Buddhist rituals. By the seventh century, Buddhist authors were unabashed in announcing that huge debts owed to the mother for breast-feeding and birthing could only be repaid by supporting the Buddhist establishment, which claimed to have the powers needed to resolve the "debt crisis" in the family.
Though obviously "farming feelings," this new form of filial piety also served to support the traditional Chinese family. A close look at the popular Tang apocryphal work entitled, Sutra on the Profound Kindness of Parents (Fu Mu En Zhong Jing) reveals how mother-son filial piety buttressed the traditional patrilineal family through tying the son to his natal family-via his devotion to his mother, and thereby reinforced patrilocal styles of family reproduction. Thus, by focusing on mother-son affection this clever reworking of filial piety encouraged support for both institutions: family and monastery. The discourse of Buddhist filial piety was refined and augmented in numerous ways in the following centuries, but clearly a balance had been struck in which Buddhist constructions of ideal mother-son relations sought to harness a son's emotions in order to direct his loyalties (financial and otherwise) toward the family lineage and the Buddhist monasteries.
Filial Piety and Value in the Ritual Production of Family Relations
P. Steven Sangren, Cornell University
Families are usefully conceived of as arenas of "value production." Women's familial roles and relationships constitute a form of production understood to include not only material production and women's labor power in the conventional Marxian sense, but also women's roles in producing and reproducing family life. In ritual activities like pilgrimage and daily worship, the socially determined value of women's productive activities is converted into collective value forms that represent women's productive capacities as though men, and not women, were the ultimate possessors of productive power. This process of value transformation lies at the core of patrilineal ideology and the cultural emphasis on filial piety. Analysis in these terms of the ways mother-son ties, for example, figure in mothers' prayers for their sons' success and safety and in the ardor of sons' testimonies and gratitude for the self-sacrificing acts of their mothers draws upon the author's fieldwork in Taiwan, the works of other anthropologists and historians, and analysis of mythic hagiographies of popular divinities. In conceptual terms, the paper demonstrates how insights drawn from Marxian notions of value and production can be both broadened and strengthened in analysis of ritual and gender, domains seldom considered from such a vantage.
Constructing Emotions: The Bond Between Mothers and Sons in Late Imperial China
Ping-chen Hsiung, Academia Sinica
This paper extends prior studies of the close bond between mothers and sons in their younger ages into the later phases of the life cycle, exploring the unfolding of that relationship in the adulthood of the sons and the old age of the mothers. It examines how the strong, intimate bond nurtured between struggling young mothers and their vulnerable dependents in the earlier stage comes to play out in a later period, when boys grow up to be the heads of the house and youthful mothers become pitiable or willful old matrons. The paper documents the shifting of roles in later life and asks how the reversal of status between sons and mothers bears on material well-being and psychological states. It also asks how the mother-son bond influences the son's interpersonal relationships and the mother's relations with her adult son and his spouse. By proposing a longer view of the history of families and emotions, I emphasize that historical studies of gender might pay greater attention to the twists and turns in the many stages of family life.
Men as Mothers: Economies of Virtue
Sophie Volpp, Smith College
My paper investigates the representation of male "mothers" in two seventeenth-century short stories, Li Yu's "A Male Mencius's Mother Raises Her Son Properly by Moving House Three Times" (Nan meng mu jiao he san qian) and the fourth story of the anonymous Hairpins Beneath a Cap ( Bian er chai). In both these stories, the male "other," who is the cross-dressed lover of the son's biological father, endures great hardship in order to raise an orphaned son (cun gu). These narratives implicitly argue against the assumption that homoerotic liaisons cannot fulfill the filial duty of producing sons.
My paper will address the following questions: Why do these exemplary tales of male mothers and their sons emphasize filiality and loyalty? Are these stories bound to a formulaic representation of the relations between mothers and sons because of the need to mimic the standards and stereotypes of heteroeroticism? How do these stories participate in a broader seventeenth-century discourse on homoeroticism?
I will argue that the seventeenth-century discourse on homoeroticism mimes and adopts the terms of heteroeroticism while competing with it. The homoerotic is caught in the dilemma of having both to imitate and supersede heteroeroticism. The exemplary tales of male mothers and their sons twist an old metaphor, the analogy between lord and retainer and man and woman. Hairpins Beneath a Cap employs a chivalric code in creating an exemplary tale of filiality and loyalty that Li Yu's later story ironically comments upon.