Ao Huang. Journal of the History of Sexuality. Volume 31, Issue 3, September 2022.
Re-Reading China’s Queer History Through a Supernatural Lens
Understanding the supernatural seems to be in epistemological tension with the formation and theorization of queer subjecthood, which is generally characterized as secular and progressive. Under the framework of neoliberal modernity and Western “sexual exceptionalism,” “normative queer subjects” have been constructed as rational and incompatible with understandings of spirituality, faith, or religion. Similarly, certain mainstream strands of queer theory seem to be committed to “an existential scepticism regarding the possibility of a transcendent, divine source of meaning.” This incompatibility can also be found in scholarship on queer history. Such tension has been markedly exacerbated by Michel Foucault’s works, which drive historians to “privilege science and medicine as the epistemic leverage for the formation of modern gender and sexual identities.” The resulting overlooking of supernatural elements also exists in the field of China’s queer history, which tends to focus on more tangible powers and regulations of gender transgression through empirical analysis of political, legal, and medical discourse. This is acknowledged by Wu Cuncun, who recognizes the important influence of Foucault and suggests that, as a result, “much of [the] attention given to sexual attitudes in Chinese history in recent years has centred on discussions of law and authority.” Apart from these contemporary scholarship traditions, the marginalization of supernatural elements has also resulted from earlier and larger epistemological assumptions closely entangled with colonialism and Orientalism. Judith T. Zeitlin observes that literature of the strange had been indiscriminately read as superstitious or timeless religious beliefs by nineteenth-century sinologists and missionaries due to colonialist assumptions that Western science was inherently superior to indigenous ways of explaining the natural world. Similar assumptions also existed when explaining human bodies and desires. Such antisuperstitious reading even prevailed through the twentieth century, with multiple waves of antisuperstition movements arising from the Republic of China period to the People’s Republic of China today. Thus, human subjectivities and gendered meanings behind Chinese supernatural storytelling traditions have been further concealed by Western and modern epistemes.
Scholars have produced brilliant works drawing upon late imperial legal sources. However, these works tend to revolve around cases of sodomy, and the embedded judicial discourse, which prioritized conviction of criminals, inevitably distorted and overshadowed human agency and emotional elements such as passion and love among nonnormative sexual subjects. Aiming to complete the picture with emotional and romantic bonds, several works look at homoerotic novels and literary accounts by late imperial elite men, which tend to focus on the urban homoerotic scene and the gender-crossing phenomenon related to the entertainment sector. However, such emotional bonds were largely products of elite men’s self-representation or rhetorical strategies, whereas subaltern men’s own subjectivities were inevitably excluded. Also excluded were queer women in late imperial China, who have left even fewer traces in these writings.
To overcome this historiographical and theoretical marginalization, this article aims to recenter the supernatural in exploring the meanings and constructions of gender nonnormativity in late imperial China. As the scholarship on premodern Chinese writings of the supernatural showcases, these writings had a long intellectual tradition, and the anomalies documented were considered not only as ontological categories recording natural phenomena or literary fabrication but also as a rhetorical and epistemological category influencing social, cultural, and moral discourse. Similarly, understandings of the supernatural also formed an indispensable part of late imperial China’s gender system, and literary constructions of gender and supernatural motifs did not, as Zeitlin considers, “passively reflect social or religious reality but [were] actively involved in shaping it.” Furthermore, the yin/yang paradigm of gender differences was essentially based on the two fundamental cosmological pulses of yin and yang in ancient Chinese cosmology. This cosmological notion, as Song Geng illustrates, went through Confucianization and became inextricably linked with morals and hierarchies regulating family and gender relations that were derived from the principle of tianren heyi (the unity of Heaven and man). This conceptual link between one’s gendered position and Heaven through the balance of yin and yang provided a logical ground to interpret gender nonnormativity using rationales involving the supernatural, since nonnormative bodies and desires, frequently explained through the changing of yin and yang, were usually mediated and authorized by supernatural forces. Echoing this logic, the interpretation of one’s gendered position in social and family relations, as Kathryn Bernhardt considers, was grounded in “cosmically ordained social roles” rather than concepts of individual rights and property rights.
Analyzing the supernatural construction of gender nonnormativity can also help us to unearth a more nonelite, local perspective of queer history that differs from the elite discourse of homoeroticism and gender transformation that has prevailed in existing scholarship. Supernatural beliefs were among the few cross-class and cross-gender beliefs widely entrenched in the rigid late imperial society. According to John B. Henderson, this general worldview, based on “correlative thinking” and underpinned by the supernatural link between human bodies and cosmic parts, “permeated nearly every level of culture, elite and popular.” (So widespread were such views that they even influenced legislation and the imperial examination system. This class-crossing nature is also reflected in the transmission of “strange” stories in nonreligious texts, sources that this article draws upon. These popular stories and narratives, according to Zeitlin, had been largely circulating on the local level “among friends, household members or chance acquaintances,” and some of these stories were transmitted through established storytelling traditions that “cut across class lines” and traveled through time and place into contemporary literati compilations and writings.
How to Read the Supernatural in Queer History
So how can we approach these long-overlooked supernatural elements and decipher the significance of gender nonnormativity through analyzing its supernatural construction? Two main approaches have been established by scholars. The first group of scholars have delved into the rich religious texts in Chinese history, including Buddhist and Daoist canons, to look for nonnormative figures and motifs, including male pregnancy, intersex bodies, sex change, and so on. However, these works mainly focus on the interpretations and implications of gender nonnormativity within the contexts of religious beliefs, practices, and rituals rather than engaging these transgressions with the wider gender systems outside of religious communities. Looking at official records and dynastic histories, the second approach identifies supernatural elements in documented cases of gender and sexual anomalies. However, this analysis tends to emphasize the political interpretation of the supernatural in depicting gender nonnormativity, as these transgressive individuals were frequently constructed as heavenly warnings or omens of disasters or political chaos to help authors to advance their political agendas. Similarly, this political reading did not thoroughly reveal the relations between the supernatural construction and these nonnormative subjects’ gendered positions and their sexual activities with others. As Olivia Milburn points out, these individuals were mere “messengers,” “not to be blamed for the terrible events they portended.” Their transgressions were no longer a personal issue of individual (mis)behavior; instead, they were always linked to preexisting political problems.
Differing from these two approaches, this article repositions these gender nonnormative individuals and the supernatural constructions around them back into the gender system they lived in. This is done by analyzing the power dynamics and interactions between them and other normative individuals, whom they were differentiated from by supernatural depictions, and, more importantly, by juxtaposing the supernatural construction of their transgressive bodies or behavior with the orthodox gender norms. I use the broad term “gender nonnormativity” deliberately to describe a series of transgressive phenomena that might have destabilized existing gender categories or disrupted family structures and social hierarchies of late imperial China, including unexplained gender transformation, intersex figures with ambiguous sexual and reproductive organs, and unregulated same-sex relationships between individuals of similar social backgrounds and unaltered gender identities. As this article will showcase, the boundaries between people’s perceptions of these various types of nonnormativity were ambiguous and not necessarily clear-cut. Sometimes people’s perceptions toward different gender nonnormativity even intersected, depending on the context and the subject’s social and gender backgrounds. These intersecting perceptions were even more evident in the supernatural constructions around these gender nonnormative subjects. Building upon Charlotte Furth’s point that “gender transgression often … reinforce[s] accepted social hierarchies by a controlled display of their inversion,” this article argues that supernatural constructions functioned in a similar way to other more tangible and “secular” powers, achieving the same aim of defining, regulating, and integrating transgressive elements into the robust gender system of late imperial China and thus helping to consolidate the existing patriarchal family structure and moral system rather than transcending them. These supernatural constructions followed three main narratives, as this article will demonstrate: retribution for illicit sexual behavior, reward for embodying orthodox gender norms, and reincarnation for redefining same-sex relationships as different-gender relationships. This article concentrates on the representation and the epistemology around these supernatural events. Concerns regarding the accurate depiction of these events are beyond the scope of this article.
Retribution
Retribution formed an essential part of the late imperial Chinese understanding of the supernatural. It was bound up with personal and family responsibilities and offered a “rational” answer to personal suffering. In terms of gender, a person’s proper sexual conduct and morals were key to fulfilling such responsibilities. To regulate sexual conduct, certain gender nonnormativity, including unexplained male-to-female gender transformation, intersex figures, and unregulated same-sex activities, was frequently interpreted through the narrative of retribution. These nonnormative subjects tended to be punished by supernatural forces for their illicit sexual activities, which were considered disruptive to the gender system and its related moral universe.
Male-to-Female Gender Transformation as Retribution
Traditional Chinese cosmological and philosophical thought, especially the tradition of “correlative thinking,” which linked biological, moral, and cosmological phenomena together through an underlying pattern of ganying (affinities), provided a useful epistemological framework to render unexplained gender transformation intelligible. Also, traditional Chinese biological and medical thinking was largely influenced by the two cosmological essences, yin and yang. Symbolizing masculinity and femininity, these two essences were understood to be mutually reinforcing and capable of turning into each other, thus completing a conceptual ground for gender transformation.
One of the most widely circulated cases of unexplained gender transformation was that of Li Liangyu in the late Ming, which was documented in official historical records such as Mingshi (The history of Ming) in 1568. Li’s case has also been widely documented and interpreted by contemporary literati in various forms of works, frequently as omens of the corrupted officialdom and the declining Heavenly Mandate of the Ming. This dominant political interpretation of gender-transforming figures derived from a long-established tradition that goes back to the Han time. Also based on Li’s case, a story from the 1630s by the late Ming novelist Lu Renlong, “Xi’anfu fubieqi, Heyangxian nanhua nu” (Husband left the wife in Xi’an Prefecture, a man turned into a woman in Heyang County), which included a supernatural setting of the underworld court to sanction his gender transformation through the narrative of retribution, provided a more local, gender-related lens into people’s rationales of unexplained male-to-female transformation.
Unsatisfied with the profit gained from farming, Li Liangyu decided to leave his hometown and venture into business with businessman Lu Da while leaving his wife at home. Under the influence of Lu, who was used to frequently visiting brothels while on business trips, the then-innocent Li gave in and consorted with a female prostitute. As a result, Li contracted yangmei chuang (plum-blossom sore), a type of syphilis. “Just within a few days, his genital area became rotten … and his facial hair started to fall out.” The unbearable pain eventually made him pass out. In a dream, Li was transported to the underworld court, where he was tried by the yinsi (underworld judge), a recurring supernatural plot in contemporary literature. According to the judge, Li had been “a daughter of the Li family in Zhen’an County in a previous life.” For the verdict, the judge decided that “Li should remain a woman and should marry Lu Da.” When Li woke up, Li found that the pain had disappeared. His male genitals had also disappeared, as he had turned into a woman. Following the underworld judge’s verdict, Li and Lu started to live as wife and husband. To better fulfill the new female role, Li took “her” husband Lu’s advice: “A man should dress like a man; a woman should dress like a woman.” Li started to wear makeup and women’s clothes and began to bind “her” feet. Li’s gender transformation, initiated as supernatural retribution for Li’s licentious behavior and authorized by supernatural forces at the underworld court, was gradually consummated when Li began to perform the conventional roles of women in the human world.
Lu Renlong’s story, especially his depiction of mobile men and their sexual activities leading up to Li’s sex change and the supernatural scene, might have reflected the growing anxiety toward the deteriorating social and sexual morals in the late Ming period that warranted regulation or retribution in their absence. Such anxiety was partly fueled by the growing numbers of unmarried men, like Lu Da, as well as sojourning married men leaving home for work, like Li Liangyu. Destabilizing the household unit and the economic production patterns attached to it, the existence of these mobile men also risked leading to more sexual encounters outside of the domestic circle, the designated space for sexual activities. This anxiety can be first seen at the beginning of the story when Li’s decision to leave his wife for business was met with his brother’s opposition toward and suspicion of Lu: “[Lu] spent all his time doing business and could not find a wife. How is it possible that he knows how to earn money? You should just get on with your life. How can you abandon the young sister-in-law while venturing away?” This growing mobile male population in late Ming, including sojourning merchants like Lu and Li, as well as literati and students preparing for civil examinations, fueled the entertainment industry, especially that for female prostitutes, as sex was increasingly commercialized in a market environment to accommodate these men. This established trend can be seen in the author’s depiction of the seasoned businessman Lu, who not only was used to visiting brothels while traveling but also introduced the neophyte Li to this new world. Along with the spread of the entertainment industry, venereal diseases in the late Ming were also spreading. The late Ming witnessed waves of syphilis epidemics. The spread of plum-blossom sores, the type of syphilis that Li contracted, was widely documented in late Ming works. In the late sixteenth-century medical encyclopedia Bencao gangmu (Systematic materia medica), Li Shizhen recorded how plum-blossom sores “have spread from the South to the North and now can be found across the seas” due to “licentious behavior between men and women.” Another wave of this epidemic occurred around 1630, as documented by late Ming physician Chen Sicheng in Meichuang milu (Secret record of syphilis), in which the author explicitly linked the spread of the disease to brothels and worried that men who contracted it from brothels would further spread it to family members in the domestic sphere. This was also around the same period when Lu completed this story collection. Therefore, the author chose plum-blossom sores, directly reflecting the prevalent anxiety of that time, as the trigger for the retribution causing Li’s gender transformation for his own sexual misconduct.
Similar retribution narratives explaining male-to-female gender transformation remained robust throughout the Qing period. Mid-Qing author Changbai Haogezi produced Yingchuan yicao (Strange notes from a late-night study). This collection of strange events from late Ming and early Qing times later became widely circulated when it was republished by the popular late Qing publisher Shenbaoguan in 1877. Within this collection, the story “Tian Zaichun” recorded the retribution exacted on a licentious businessman named Tian Zaichun. Similar to Lu in the previous story, Tian was unmarried and indulged in casual sexual affairs while traveling for work. He even refused the idea of settling down with his own family. The author deployed a similar plot of a supernatural trial. Like Li, Tian felt ill one day and was transported to the underworld court in a dream. During the trial a Daoist deity’ delivered a more didactic style of message criticizing the sexual threat these mobile men posed to women and existing morals: “To satisfy your own licentious desire, you have tainted the family reputation of hundreds of people! The relatives of those women were heartbroken. So sly were you that you did not even make any compromise!” As his punishment, Tian was castrated and turned into a woman, who was later sold into a brothel and forced to entertain men. The punishment was justified in language that showcased the strong conceptual links between one’s sexual conduct and potential retribution: “All licentious sins of that person should be punished before the end of their life, so the retribution of one individual can warn a hundred. If one’s sins were left unpunished till the next life, how could the dead [victims] be informed? Is the living person [the villain] still guilty’ even?”
The anxiety around illicit sexual conduct by unmarried and itinerant men, depicted in the previous Ming story, continued to rise into the Qing period. The main target of the Qing court in regulating male sexual conduct, according to Matthew H. Sommer, was unmarried but sexually active men standing outside of the “family-based social and moral order that underpinned the imperial state.” Tian, an epitome of these targeted men, could disrupt the mainstream pattern of settled households and morality by destroying the reputation of decent women and their families, as the Daoist deity declared. However, compared to domestic women, who were valued and protected, female prostitutes were marginalized and considered as being outside of the existing family pattern, as this story revealed. They were relegated to the same, if not lower, level as these dangerous men, as Tian was punished by being turned into a female prostitute.
These two stories together also shed light on people’s deeper understanding of the process of male-to-female gender transformation or the boundaries between the gender categories of “men” and “women.” Already degraded as a punishment, this gender transformation process was heavily embedded in phallocentric views, as the loss of male genitals played a first, yet determinant, step in the transforming process. Li’s gender transformation was triggered by the loss of his male genitalia, caused by a venereal disease. Tian’s gender transformation occurred by castration in the underworld court. As soon as they lost their male genitals, these two gender-transforming figures started to exhibit female traits, including enlarging breasts and shrinking feet, which symbolized their gradual integration into biological women’s identity and other bodily conventions for women. Their loss of male sexual identity, directly marked by the loss of male genitals, was also consummated by penetrative sexual acts with other men, with Li penetrated by fellow businessman Lu and Tian penetrated by the clients in the brothel. The gendering effect of being penetrated was prevalent in Qing legal discourse, since “being penetrated” meant the disavowal of one’s masculinity, rendering the penetrated individuals as feminine.
Intersex Bodies as Retribution
Similar to male-to-female gender transformation, intersex bodies were also interpreted as retribution to unregulated, illicit sexual conduct. People’s perceptions of intersexuality were deeply entrenched within an understanding of the supernatural. The frequent usage of supernatural and religious motifs to explain intersex bodies could be seen in late Ming texts, including Shen Defu’s Wanliyehuo bian (Unofficial matters from the Wanli reign), Xie Zhaozhe’s Wu zazu (Five miscellaneous records), and Li Shizhen’s medical encyclopedia, Bencao gangmu. However, these records, as Milburn points out, tended to only document intersex figures as objects of curiosity or omens of political chaos similar to sex-changing men. Compared to these late imperial sources that documented intersex figures in an isolated manner, the intersex character Qijie—a woman born with not only female but also male genitals—constructed by mid-Qing author Cao Qujing, provided a different lens through which to view how intersex figures were perceived in the domestic sphere, especially in relation to people’s sexual activities. Qijie came from Cao’s eighteenth-century novel Guwangyan (Nonsense), set in the late Ming with popular proverbs, jokes, and detailed depictions of sexual practices. Although it is “easily among the most extreme of novels from the Ming and Qing dynasties,” it was still considered by Keith McMahon to be “serious in its moral message.” Like the characters in previous male-to-female transformation stories, Qijie was conceived originally as a boy, then her sex changed to a girl during the prenatal period, and finally her intersex body was framed in a retribution narrative as the punishment for illicit sexual behavior. At first, a female concubine surnamed Zou, Qijie’s mother, was introduced. Zou actively pursued an adulterous relationship with a stranger who turned out to be a fox spirit. Having impregnated Zou, the fox spirit revealed to Zou:
I am a thousand-year-old fox spirit and am fully realized. I had never dared to commit the sin of licentiousness. My licentious thought was only provoked by your earlier wanton behavior during the day in the courtyard…. The baby conceived in you a month ago was supposed to be a boy. But your husband is extremely debauched and has tarnished many other women; thus, his patriline should be terminated. Although you are bearing my son, I am in the dark, and he is under the light. Inevitably, the boy will belong to him. Thus, the fetus became a girl. However, she has male genitals but not exactly the normal male genitals. People like her who combine both yang and yin and cannot reproduce are known as er’xingzi [people of two forms]. She would function like a man in the first half of each month, then a woman in the second half. The morning after the night of her conception, she was polluted by your husband’s licentious essence. In future, this woman is bound to be extremely ravenous and will die because of this. This is also caused by her parents’ licentious behavior.
Just as the fox spirit predicted, Qijie was “extremely ravenous.” She not only had sex with her husband, whom she penetrated in the first half of each month, but also approached other men and women. In the end, Qijie was killed by Zhen’gu, a female relative who took revenge on her after being sexually approached by Qijie when they were sleeping together. Apart from Qijie being constructed as retribution for her mother’s adultery, the marginalization of intersex bodies can be easily detected from the author’s choice of names of female characters. Qijie, which could be translated as Sister Strange, made a sharp contrast with the name Zhen’gu, translated as Mrs. Chaste. Chastity was one of the most valued traits that determined proper womanhood in late imperial China. This female virtue was embodied and protected by Zhen’gu, who eliminated the disruptive, strange woman Qijie, who not only was a product of her unchaste mother but also threatened the chastity of other domestic women. Also depicted as the retribution for unchaste womanhood was Qijie’s husband, Niu Geng, who always had a distinct desire to be sexually penetrated. This abnormal feminine trait for men was, as the author suggests, due to Niu being the adulterous child of his mother and a cross-dressing dan actor surnamed Hu, who had previously been sexually penetrated uncountable times: “The essence of the father and that of the son was mutually linked.” This frequent usage of retribution in depicting and explaining nonnormative bodies and desires might serve as a key rhetorical device to achieve what McMahon coins “the pornographic doctrine,” helping to deliver a didactic and moral message criticizing “sexual anarchy” and moral degeneration on a national level in the collapsing Ming. Most characters in Guwangyan, as Martin Huang echoes, “undergo a terrible retribution as a result of their inability to control their desires.” And this was common in contemporary erotic literature.
A phallocentric emphasis in understanding gender nonnormativity was also prominent in this novel, especially with regard to how Qijie’s intersex body was constructed and perceived. Qijie looked and acted just like any other woman. The only feature that marked Sister Strange’s body as “strange” was her male genitals, caused by retribution. This was not only how she was identified, remembered by her numerous lovers, but also what made her a great sexual threat in the domestic sphere to decent women like Zhen’gu and to other men. This phallocentrism could also be found in late imperial legal regulation of sexual activities, which emphasized guarding against what Sommer terms “penetration out of place”: the legal and social aspects of phallic penetration engendered social and gendered hierarchies, ensuring the penetrator’s domination over the penetrated and men’s domination over women. By penetrating her husband, the male household leader, whose proper masculinity should have been guarded, Qijie disrupted these hierarchies. This is not to mention the threat she posed by penetrating other women, which went beyond these hierarchies and protocols that revolved around men. Similarly, McMahon considers Qijie to be the “culmination” of the novel’s “climactic portrayal of aberrant sexual beings,” as her presence threatens to replace men by undertaking their penetrative sexual role. At the end of the novel, Qijie’s death was caused by the loss of her male genitalia, which were bitten off by Zhen’gu.
Furthermore, this story also revealed people’s phallocentric understandings of sexual activities between women. It was considered safe for women to sleep in the same bedroom (for example, Zhen’gu accepted Qijie’s invitation to sleep together before she discovered Qijie’s intersex body), as no sexual activities could have been conceivable due to the lack of male genitals and phallic penetrative sex. No legal attention to regulating sex between women or “penetration out of place” was required, as sex without a phallus would not undermine either of the hierarchies. In the literary realm, sexual activities between women received little attention in late imperial writings. Under this phallocentric logic, penetration by sex toys was also regarded as less sexual or less problematic, especially dildos, which had a long history in China. The use of these sex toys also appeared in late imperial Chinese novels such as Guwangyan and Jin Ping Mei (translated and published in English as The Plum in the Golden Vase). Not only used during sexual intercourse, these toys were also portrayed as possessions owned and used by women in the inner court, domestic women, widows, and even nuns when phallic penetrative sex was inaccessible or disallowed. Nevertheless, such unproblematic and “nonsexual” environments would only change when nonnormative figures with penises were involved in the domestic sphere, such as intersex women with male genitals like Qijie, the male fox spirit, and feminized male entertainers such as Niu’s biological father who were institutionalized to perform penetrated roles. Again, all of this “penetration out of place”—to extend Sommer’s notion across gender, biological, and metaphysical boundaries by including intersex and nonhuman bodies—was regulated here by supernatural forces through retribution.
Retribution for Unregulated Male-Male Sexual Activities
Contrary to penisless sexual activities between women, unregulated male-male sexual acts, especially penetrative sex between men of similar social backgrounds and unaltered gender identities, constituted disruptive and illicit sexual conduct that would trigger retribution. In line with the phallocentric logic and concerns over “penetration out of place,” this more egalitarian type of sexual act was perceived differently from the “normative same-sex relationships” that followed strict social and sexual hierarchies between the penetrating elite men and the penetrated male entertainers, which were more tolerated and even sometimes celebrated in late imperial China. Late imperial sources had long been using supernatural and religious motifs to condemn this nonnormative type of unregulated male-male sexual activity’. For example, late Ming literatus Shen Defu used Buddhist texts to explain such men as “people whose wuchu [five body parts] were filled with lust” and who were “ridiculous but pitiful.” However, Shen only painted a rather general unaccepting attitude toward this sexual practice instead of providing a deeper insight into the cause of such unacceptability. A more detailed case that revealed deeper human rationales behind this retribution narrative is presented in the story “Changshu Chengsheng” (Scholar Cheng of Changshu), by Qing literatus Yuan Mei. This story came from his late eighteenth-century story collection Zi buyu (What the master would not discuss), which contained stories from oral accounts, local gazettes, and official documents. This collection, as Paolo Santangelo contends, uncovered deep trends, popular awareness, and rationales in late imperial society. Like many of his contemporary literati peers, the author, Yuan Mei, himself was widely known for indulging in the company of both female beauties and an “endless supply of song-boys or actors,” which was seen as a symbol of one’s social standing and cultural refinement. However, a different and more condemning tone was deployed if the penetrated boy was a liang jiazidi (a son of a commoner family) rather than a feminized male entertainer from the jianmin (mean people) background. This retribution story was set in 1744. Forty-year-old Mr. Cheng took the provincial-level civil examination. During the night, Cheng was heard screaming like a crazy person. The next morning, Cheng handed in his blank answer sheet and quit the exam. After being questioned by other candidates, Cheng confessed that he had previously developed an intimate relationship with one of his male students, Liu. Age nineteen, Liu was good-looking and came from a prominent household. Misjudging the situation, one night Cheng got Liu drunk and sexually penetrated him. Afterward, Liu felt so ashamed that he committed suicide. His family was clueless about the true reason behind Liu’s death because Cheng remained silent and was thus left unpunished. The retribution against Cheng came on his examination day. When Cheng entered the examination room, he saw Liu sitting there. Next to Liu was a government runner, who took Liu and Cheng to the underworld court. The underworld judge first heard Liu plead his case and then stated to Cheng: “According to the law, predator sodomizers should be punished for pouring foul material into the mouth of another person, receiving one hundred blows of the heavy bamboo. As a teacher, your mind was licentious and evil. Therefore, you deserve heavier punishment. You were destined, with two chances, to make [it] onto the top candidate list and earn an official post. Now you are deprived of them.”
By explicitly referencing the legal statute on sodomy that existed in the Great Qing Code under the “illicit sex” section, Yuan Mei’s story reflected the understanding that the underworld court in the parallel supernatural universe was inherently and inextricably connected to the human world and its legal system and power structures. Retribution served as a justice power that went between the human and supernatural worlds, as well as a safety net to catch predators like Cheng who were left unpunished by the legal system in real life. The character development of the sodomy victim, Liu, also showcased the prevalent anxiety regarding young, vulnerable boys who risked being sexually penetrated and thus losing their proper male social and sexual identity. The fact that Liu came from a prominent household also ran parallel with Qing sodomy law, which explicitly defined the victim of sodomy as Hang jiazidi. Unlike male entertainers, who came from a lower, stigmatized background, these “commoner” boys were to become the proper leaders of the orthodox household units, which formed the scaffolding of a stable society. These family roles such as husbands and fathers required them to play the sexually penetrating role. Thus, these boys and their immature masculinity needed to be protected, especially from being compromised and feminized by “penetration out of place.” By contrast, male entertainers, outcasts from the social and family systems, were institutionalized to play the sexually penetrated roles. For commoners and elite men, penetrating sex with these feminine, “mean” boys fell into a more regulated and hierarchical framework. It also reproduced the orthodox framework of different-gender sex and hence was considered less disruptive to the family and social structures.
Liu’s male gender identity and commoner social identity, with the tension caused by his feminizing actions, including being sexually penetrated and then lulling himself, were foregrounded at the supernatural court. The judge scolded Liu: “As a man who had an old mother to look after, your life carried great responsibility. How could you do what women would normally do, taking your life lightly? The Book of Changes stated that it is shameful for men to follow women’s chaste virtues. From the ancient times, the court would celebrate chaste women but never chaste boys. This is why the sage created the law; shouldn’t you think three times about it?” Like a judge in the human world, the underworld judge served as the arbiter of orthodox gender norms, emphasizing the proper boundaries between men and women and the different responsibilities and expectations assigned to them. Because Liu was a man of the commoner class, his decision to commit suicide after being sexually tarnished, which mirrored what some female rape victims would do to defend their chastity, was discouraged. However, in a hierarchical male-male relationship, female virtues like chastity and loyalty of the socially weaker toward his partner or master were always praised in late imperial literature, including in the late Ming playwright Li Yu’s famous play Nan mengmu jiaohe sanqian (A male Mencius’s mother raises her son properly by moving house three times) and the story “Qingqi ji” (The wonder of qing) from the late Ming male-male love story collection Bian’er chai (Caps with hairpins).
The end of “Changshu Chengsheng” also sheds an interesting light on people’s ambiguous yet intersecting perceptions of gender transformation and individuals involved in same-sex sexual activities. Having sentenced Cheng, the judge went on to punish Liu for compromising his own masculinity: “Since you are so closed-minded, in your next life, you will be punished by being reborn as a chaste woman of the Jiang family in Shanxi. You shall receive the official recognition for your chastity.” Male-to-female gender transformation, this time through reincarnation, served as retribution, as well as a solution for Liu’s compromised masculinity. His penetrated and suicidal past made him ineligible to live as a proper man in the next life to fulfill male responsibilities. As a result, the gender category of women became a more suitable one for penetrated commoner men like Liu.
Reward
Although the yin and yang essences indicating gender differences were fluid and interchangeable, they were not equal. Such fluidity followed the existing social and gender hierarchies, and especially through the processes of Confucianization, yang was considered as superior to yin, thus justifying the dominant status of men compared to women in social and family orders. In examining sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts, Furth found that female-to-male sex changes were more socially welcomed and explained more simply than male-to-female changes. In eighteenth-century vernacular novels, McMahon observes the parallel asymmetry in depicting temporary cross-dressing by men and women. Women cross-dressing as men were frequently portrayed as achieving upward social mobility or as seeking to complete missions in the absence of men, whereas men cross-dressing as women were considered as “not only illogical but perverse,” or driven by their own sexual interests to access women in the domestic sphere. Similar patterns also underpinned the supernatural narrative of reward in explaining female-to-male gender transformation alongside the gender and social hierarchies that “are derived from the principles of Heaven and Earth.” Contrary to male-to-female transformation and intersex bodies, which were usually interpreted as retribution for disruptive behavior, female-to-male transformation was interpreted as heavenly reward to individuals for embodying and following orthodox gender norms and family values, including female chastity, superiority of male offspring, and filial piety. The celebration of these values, both in the human world through official recognition or in the supernatural universe through heavenly reward, was important for consolidating the patriarchal family structure, which buttressed the late imperial gender system.
Reward for Chaste and Loyal Widows
Early Qing official Li Shihong documents female-to-male gender transformation being interpreted as a reward for chaste widows in his Renshutang biji (Jottings from the Hall of Mercy and Forgiveness). This collection included local events and stories compiled by Li around the 1670s during his post in Gansu Province, where this gender transformation incident took place: “There had been a military official surnamed Zhuang based in Hongchen garrison station in Zhuanglang County. Zhuang had later passed away, leaving a widow and a daughter…. At the age of twelve, the daughter suddenly became a man…. People in the garrison station believed it was because widow Zhuang remained chaste despite impoverished living conditions in the garrison. Even Heaven was unwilling to cut the patriline of the family Zhuang.” Chastity was one of the most important female virtues that defined proper womanhood for both married women like Zhen’gu (Mrs. Chaste), who were expected to refuse illicit sexual activities, and widows like Zhuang who did not remarry. From the early Qing through the Kangxi reign, when this collection was written, the chastity cult increased its popularity and was even caught up in political dynamics, becoming linked to empire consolidation. The narrative of reward in this story, expressed through public belief and recognition among “people in the garrison station” and through the fact that it was documented by the author, a local governor, mirrored the praise and celebration that chaste widows would receive at the local level. Such celebration of female chastity was even institutionalized with the imperial canonization system and commemorative arches under the rule of the first two Qing emperors. Through this supernatural construction of reward, the unexplained and potentially transgressive gender transformation was turned into a public celebration and integrated into the existing gender system. Nevertheless, it was the patriarchal family values that preferred male offspring to female and emphasized the continuation of the patriline that rendered this reward narrative plausible in the first place.
A similar case of female-to-male transformation as reward for widows was documented by contemporary renowned ci (lyric poetry) writer Wu Chenyan in the early eighteenth century. This story, entitled “Nu huawei nan” (A girl turning into a boy), came from Wu’s Kuangyuan zazhi (Miscellaneous records from a sunlit garden). The main character, a widow surnamed Lu, had just lost her husband, Yang, who had died protecting the ancestral tomb. Their only son followed his father and killed himself. Yang also had a concubine, who was expecting a baby. Widow Lu stopped crying and said: “Even my late husband’s concubine had offspring. Who would then mourn for me when I die?” And “from morning to evening, [Lu’s] tears flowed all over her cheeks, reciting Buddhist texts.” Like the authors of other contemporary supernatural constructions, Wu Chenyan included a dream setting: “One night in her dream, the Buddha came and rewarded [widow Lu] with a son. Lu woke up and remembered it well, but later the concubine gave birth to a girl. Lu felt she had no more hope left. In the spring of the year Dinghai [1647], other family members in the clan gathered to divide Yang’s inheritance. Even the head of the clan felt sorry about discussing this issue.” On the night before the sacrifice ritual, the supernatural force came into play and granted the gender transformation:
The girl could not stop crying. Concubine Zhang took the girl to bed. Zhang was trapped in a nightmare and could not wake up. Lu called Zhang, but it seemed that Zhang could not hear her. Lu felt strange and went to inspect, only to find out that the girl was not a girl anymore. [Lu] screamed in surprise and summoned other family members. Although [the baby’s] face and body looked the same, the private area had developed male genitalia. Next to them the marks of blood remained noticeable. Feeling bewildered at first, everyone then realized that the previous dream [that widow Lu had had] was not fake. [They] all gathered in front of the Buddha to worship it and renamed [the baby] Fo’ci [Buddha’s Reward]…. The day of this bodily transformation happened to be the same date the father and the son died the previous year, or maybe this baby was the reincarnation of the ten-year-old son, who had followed his father and killed himself. A person named Tang Junmo in Xuancheng witnessed this event in person.
Here the author has foregrounded a widow’s precarious situation within her deceased husband’s family, especially for widows like Lu who no longer had a son to be the legitimate heir, to provide support or a more secure position for her in the family or to mourn for her after she passed away, as she directly mentioned earlier. Nevertheless, the gender transformation of the concubine’s daughter could improve Lu’s predicament. Usually recognized as a legitimate heir in practice, a concubine’s son could be adopted by the widow and was fully capable of fulfilling family tasks such as commemoration and continuing the ancestral sacrifices. Moreover, the gender-transforming baby in this story had already been suggested to be the reincarnation of Lu’s own son. Together with the widow Zhuang from the previous story, who lived an impoverished and single life in the garrison, this story showcases the practical rationales behind the reward narrative of female-to-male gender transformation for sonless women themselves in an heirless family setting, apart from ensuring the continuation of the patriline for their husbands. The end of this story also showcased the idea that certain gender transformations were understood as predestined, since this baby was suggested to be the reincarnation of Lu’s dead son. Therefore, the male gender of this gender-transforming baby, or potentially an intersex baby whose male genitalia were not overt at birth, had already been decided beforehand by supernatural forces. Following this logic, the baby had always been a boy, the widow’s son, trapped in an ambiguous body, waiting for the right moment to reveal his true gender. These moments for triggering gender transformation or, more precisely, gender disclosure were, without doubt, arranged alongside Confucian moral principles and family values. Similar perceptions of predestined male-to-female transformation were depicted by Lu Renlong in Li Liangyu’s story. After Li’s gender transformation was triggered by his licentious sexual behavior, the underworld judge revealed that Li had been a woman in the previous life and decided that Li should remain a woman in the present life from that point on. In the different narrative of reward in this story, the female-to-male gender transformation not only was granted to improve Lu’s situation but also was a reward to her late husband, Yang, and their son, loyal family members who had died protecting the ancestral tomb.
Reward for Filial Daughters
As embodied by Yang and his sons, filial piety and loyalty to the family and senior members was another key value that ensured the function of the patriarchal family structure. Similar reward stories that praised such values through female-to-male transformation also circulated widely in late imperial China. One of them was the late Qing story entitled “Nu huanan” (A woman turns into a man). It came from the poet Li Qingchen’s story collection Zuicha, zhiguai (Strange stories of the intoxicant tea), which was compiled in 1892. According to Yang Guangyi, who wrote the prologue, this collection was drawn from odd events and anecdotes the author had personally witnessed and heard. Although this collection focused on strange events, the didactic and moral lessons behind these stories were so poignant that it was as if, as Yang argues, they had “hit you over your head with a stick.” The story follows:
In the town lived a filial daughter who had already been betrothed. Her parents were old and heirless, worrying about the continuation of the family line every day. Upset by this, the daughter religiously worshiped the Beidou star every day for a year. One night, a god showed up in the courtyard with red hair and a red beard, looking scary. The god asked the girl what she was praying for. The girl answered that she wished to become a boy in order to carry the family name. The god nodded and then disappeared. The next day, the girl felt a wave of heat in her stomach, which later moved to her private area. When touching it, she found male genitalia down there, just like those of a man. After finding out what had happened, the family of the betrothed called off the marriage. Someone else that had heard the news decided to marry their son-in-law’s sister [to this “girl”], who later gave birth to two sons. They remained filially devoted to the parents until they passed away happy.
As they were in previous reward stories, daughters were expected to sacrifice themselves for the family. However, we should not just read women as being passive victims of the patriarchal family system under this reward narrative. Unlike in previous cases, in this story we can read a form of female agency in the process of gender transformation that was constructed by the male author. The daughter in this story, the gender-transforming subject herself, was the active agent who initiated and willingly went through the gender transformation by praying to the Beidou star and directly demanding this of the god. Such agency in gender transformation was absent in the retribution narratives featuring male-to-female transformation.
Nevertheless, like those in the retribution narrative, supernatural forces here served as the arbiter of orthodox gender norms and the judge who authorized gender transformation, given that the gender-transforming subject was driven by filial piety and loyalty to the patriline, values that reinforced the dominant family values and gender hierarchies. The daughter’s “correct” intention to initiate gender transformation was emphasized by the author’s ending comment: “Wasn’t this girl similar to women like Mulan and Tiying? How genuine and strong her mind was! Such sincerity could reach Heaven. This sincerity emerged from filiality; how could Heaven not be moved? The world’s creator was so marvellous and could eventually turn a woman into a man. It was her filiality that ensured the realization of her intention. If it were not for filiality, she would just be a renyao [human freak]. What’s the value of that?” By deploying the term renyao for disruptive and unauthorized gender-transforming figures, the author’s comment showcases that people’s attitudes toward female-to-male gender transformation were not monolithic but dependent on context. If the gender-transforming subject followed and embodied existing gender and social hierarchies, their seemingly transgressive bodies and behavior could also be celebrated, just like Mulan and Tiying, two female paragons widely celebrated for their “transgressive” acts that embodied filial piety. This allowed them to be separated from the disruptive renyao. After being authorized by supernatural forces, such “orthodox” gender-transforming figures were then successfully integrated into the family structure and social orders through performing existing conventions and fulfilling the responsibilities of their new’ gender, including marriage and procreation, as the author highlighted at the end.
This gender-transforming sensibility was so widespread that similar storylines kept reappearing on various platforms. Around the same time, Dianshizhai huabao (Dianshizhai pictorial), an influential late Qing magazine, also published a similar story, “Xiaonii huanan” (A filial daughter becomes a man), in 1893.
In Jianping County there was an old man surnamed Yang who worked in agriculture. The couple had almost reached sixty years old but only had one daughter. Age seventeen, she was extremely filial and always put her parents’ needs first. One day her father felt so ill that he could not get up. The girl cut off three cuns (Chinese inches) of flesh from her bottom and used it to make a soup to feed her father. Soon recovered, her father stared at his daughter and sighed: “You are indeed filial. What a shame you have a woman’s body. I will become a ghost whom no one will commemorate and offer sacrifices to. What can I do?”
In this story, the anxiety of an ageing sonless father was explicitly articulated. Entrenched in supernatural understandings, family rituals like ancestor worship and sacrifices were key to sustaining the household and ensuring a sense of continuation. During these ceremonies, women were expected to assist their husbands’ families instead of their natal families. The absence of male offspring would thus mean the end of such family activities, which would render ancestors as “homeless” ghosts. What happened next mirrored the previous reward story:
After hearing this, the daughter started praying day and night for a son to continue the family line for her parents. One night in a dream, a white-haired lady showed up, putting a four –cun sugarcane and two oranges underneath her bedsheet. On waking up, [she] found something had arisen in her private area. Shocked, she called for her mother. Her mother examined it while she kept the trousers on. It felt like what a strong man would have. So overjoyed, they shared this news with neighbors and capped and dressed her as a man. Later, [“he”] married a woman and gave birth to two sons. People all agreed that it was filiality that had caused this. Everyone was amazed.
Similar to other stories about male-to-female gender transformation, this story echoed a phallocentric focus in people’s understanding of female-to-male gender transformation. During the process of transformation, the determining factor, and the most difficult stage, was the acquisition of male genitals. This step was so vital and beyond the intelligibility and capability of existing medical knowledge that it could only be completed by supernatural forces, who sanctioned it as a reward. This “sex reassignment” was, again, conducted in the “theater” of a dream, where “a four -cun sugarcane and two oranges” were successfully “implanted” by this white-haired lady. Once this crucial stage was completed and double-checked by the mother, the following steps were smooth and manageable in the human world. These included adopting men’s attire and performing a man’s family and social roles, including marrying and giving birth to children.
Reincarnation
Apart from retribution and reward, another supernatural theme that frequently appeared in literature and occupied a special space in late imperial Chinese epistemology was reincarnation. Motivated by human emotions and mediated by supernatural forces, reincarnation provided a powerful rationale, a form of escapism, and a literary device that allowed emotions to transcend boundaries of life and death, as well as other boundaries in the human world such as gender and class. Reincarnation, frequently used in homoerotic stories, also serves as a powerful gendering force to engender and assign new gender identity to the protagonist in another life or a different temporal location, thus helping to redefine same-sex relationships as different-gender ones and incorporating them into the existing gender system.
Reincarnation into the Wrong Gender to Explain Same-Sex Relationships
If we follow the supernatural temporal logic that saw one’s previous and current lives as a continuous trajectory in which gender transformation could take place, reincarnation into the wrong gender could be used to explain the cause of same-sex attraction in the current life. A great example of these reincarnation stories that dealt with themes of same-sex romance and gender transformation could be found in Mindu bieji (Supplementary record of the capital of Min). Compiled by someone known by the pseudonym Liren Heqiu (Villager Who Asks for Nothing) in the late eighteenth century, this collection recorded local histories, folklore, and cultural traditions in Fuzhou, Fujian. It included a male-male love story between two merchants named Zhang Yin and Liang Yun:
Zhang Yin and Liang Yun were born in the same year, and same month, on the same date, and at the same time. Both decent and good-looking, they were always together, even when eating and sleeping. Their parents had already arranged separate marriages for them on the same day. Zhang Yin married a woman surnamed Liang; Liang Yun married a woman surnamed Zhang. Only three nights after their weddings, [these two men] went back to sleeping and living together. Their parents felt hopeless but had no solutions…. Eventually, their parents died of old age. They even held the cremation together. Although they were both of good character, however, they favored the male mode.
After depicting the opposition and puzzlement Zhang and Liang aroused, the author then explained the reason causing the same-sex desires of these “two men of good character.” Later in the story, a cat spirit revealed that Zhang Yin and Liang Yun had been husband and wife in their previous lives:
Zhang Yin in his previous life had been the son of the Ai family within the city and was named Jinglang. Liang Yun had been the daughter of the Leng family in Jianpu named Shuangchan. These two had fallen in love with each other and hence got engaged. When the wedding was about to take place, suddenly the former emperor chose Shuangchan to enter the court as a concubine. Refusing to do so, … [they] had jumped into a fire and died together. Their spirits had survived and reunited as one, then flew to Wuyu and reincarnated separately into Zhang’s and Liang’s households. They were both reborn as boys. Therefore, they became friends, eating and sleeping together, and cannot be separated, just to make up for past sorrow and regrets.
To explain Zhang and Liang’s male-male romance, the author used the well-known characters Ai Jinglang and Leng Shuangchan from the classic love story “Lizhi huan jiangtao” (Lychee replaced camellia flowers), one of the most popular local stories that has been passed down through generations in Fuzhou. Its moving storyline still captivates people’s imaginations today, and it can still be seen on the stage of Min Opera in the twenty-first century. Through the construction of reincarnation, the same-sex romance between Zhang and Liang, which had been the source of confusion and conflicts, was rendered intelligible and legitimate by being linked to the well-known different-gender love story between Ai and Leng. This male-male love was, in essence, orthodox love between people of different genders, as one of the male lovers was, as revealed, a woman reincarnated into the wrong gender and trapped in the wrong male body.
Under this reincarnation narrative, same-sex romance was depicted as a mistake or explained as being one of the predicaments this couple had to go through, like being separated by the emperor in their previous lives, to prove that the power of the orthodox different-gender love was ultimately strong and invincible. Even with one of them being reincarnated to the wrong gender, this couple from the previous life could not be separated. Therefore, in this seemingly male-male love story, same-sex relationships were somehow relegated as a plot device to help develop the main “heterosexual” storyline. The reason male-male romance was featured was due to the very opposition and controversy attached to it, especially for the disruption caused by the nonhierarchically based male-male relationship between Zhang and Liang, who both came from a commoner background and performed social gender roles as men and family roles as husbands and household leaders. Through this construction, these oppositions and controversy were again perpetuated and highlighted. The similar discursive strategy of highlighting the tensions caused by male-male relationships in comparison with male-female relationships as the norm was more explicitly seen in the late Ming homoerotic story “Pan Wenzi qihe yuanyangzhong” (Pan Wenzi achieves the union in a tomb of a male-female mandarin duck couple) from the collection Shidiantou (The stone nods its head). The narrator of the story scolds the two male lovers, both promising students preparing for exams and soon-to-be husbands, for abandoning their family responsibilities and their betrothed, causing a great tragedy for four families.
Similar use of reincarnation to explain a male-male couple as husband and wife in the previous life could also be traced in earlier works from the seventeenth century, for example, late Ming writer and playwright Feng Menglong’s sanqu (literary song) “Qingxian qu” (The celestial song of qing). To describe the qing (passion) between two young male lovers, one of whom passed away early at the age of fifteen, the other following soon thereafter, Feng wrote: “[They] must have been husband and wife in the previous life, then becoming brothers in the current one. Although the love was strong in this life, who knows if it will be carried on into the next life? We should not worry that the life they lived this time was short. Let us hope that the two spirits will unite.” In this song, Feng deployed qing, a discourse with multiple and sometimes even contradictory meanings he frequently used in other works to depict male-male romance. Nevertheless, the supernatural construction of reincarnation may provide a unique insight into the temporal and conceptual development of qing between men. Indeed, in this song, qing was used to romanticize the relationships between the two male protagonists. However, the romanticization was still conceptualized based on the framework of “husband and wife” that had already taken form “in the previous life.” Like the story of Pan Wenzi, this song depicted their current life living as a male-male couple as a short and bumpy one that would lead to rejection and tension: “Dying together is better than living together…. It saves them from being gossiped about and criticized by people in the human world. It also saves them from having their marriages arranged by their senior family members. The stern underworld judge will take pity on the spirit of their qing.” Again, Feng’s song highlighted that human society had no place to tolerate them living as a male-male couple in the current life. The appreciation of their qing, which had taken form in their previous life, as well as their union, was moved temporally further to their afterlife in the underworld.
This reincarnation construction also reflected how authors like Feng Menglong and Liren Heqiu perceived and made sense of the nature of certain biological men with distinct desires for other men. Like Liang, such a figure was essentially seen as a woman who had been trapped in the wrong body. Liang’s gender transformation took place during reincarnation. Thus, Liang’s desire for Zhang was incorporated into the orthodox different-gender framework of the existing gender system, as it was associated with women’s attraction toward men. Again, this highlighted how people’s perceptions of someone with same-sex desires intersected with that of gender-crossing individuals. Similar sensibilities, whereby one of the biological men engaging in a same-sex relationship was seen as a womanly figure trapped in the wrong body, were prevalent in late imperial sources. In the late eighteenth century, Qing scholar Ji Yun deployed this narrative to describe Fang Junguan, one of the most renowned male entertainers of his time. Fang Junguan was widely known as a zhuangyuan furen (the wife of the top graduate from the imperial examination) due to his intimate relationships with literati. In Ji’s Yuewei caotang biji (Jottings from the grass hut for examining minutiae),
Junguan said he initially was a young student; at the age of thirteen to fourteen, he was studying in the county school…. Suddenly he was in a dream…. He looked at himself. He was wearing a long embroidered dress, with jewels and accessories on his head. Looking down at his feet, he saw two tiny bound feet. He looked just like a bride. He was confused and clueless. Then he was forcibly taken by a group of men into a tent, sat alongside a man. Scared and ashamed, he became all sweaty and then woke up. Later in his life, he was seduced by rogues and lost himself in the theatre and entertainment world. Thinking back to this dream, he realized everything had been predestined.
Ji Yun then tried to make sense of Fang Junguan’s dream of gender transformation by quoting his friend Ni Yujiang’s comment: “What is already in your mind becomes what is in the dream. What is in your mind and in your dream leads to your fallen state.” Thus, the young bride in Fang Junguan’s dream was indeed himself, as, deep down, Fang had already thought as a woman. The woman living and trapped in his body and mind also explained the reason why Fang later swapped from being a young student into being a male entertainer, excelling in the craft of female impersonation and providing intimate services to other men, skills and roles that resembled and were considered to be those possessed by women. Following Ni Yujiang’s argument around the dream and the mind, Ji Yun went on to use the reincarnation theme, mixed with the thought of retribution, to explain Fang’s gender identity and stigmatized occupation: “Such people’s debased and fallen status was retribution from their previous life. What they suffer from in this life is not completely random.”
This mixture of retribution and reincarnation thoughts could also be seen in the story of Zhang Yin and Liang Yun in Mindu bieji. As the author revealed, the reason that Liang Yun was reborn as a man was retribution for the sin they committed in the previous life. Shuangchan, the woman whom Liang was reincarnated from, had once planned with Jinglang to kill her uncle, who had evicted her and taken over the family’s fortune. In the end, Zhang and Liang shaved off their hair and turned to Buddhism, as they realized that “both the previous and current life were influenced by their wrongdoings.” In the first life, they had committed shajie (the sin of killing) by planning to kill Shuangchan’s uncle. In the second life, they committed sejie (the sin of licentiousness) by indulging themselves in a male-male relationship while ignoring their proper family and social responsibilities as men. Similar to previous sources, a happy ending for a male-male couple was never achieved in the human world.
Reincarnation into the Desired Gender to Fix Same-Sex Relationships
While reincarnation into the wrong gender from the previous life was used to explain and redefine same-sex relationships, reincarnation into a new gender in the next life can also be used as a solution to fix such relationships and envision an acceptable “orthodox” different-gender reunion. Both of these reincarnation constructions served the same aim: incorporating same-sex relationships and subjects into the existing different-gender relationship framework. Such sensibilities around gender transformation and same-sex relationships were documented in the seventeenth-century playwright Li Yu’s Lian xiangban (The fragrant companion). Depicting the romance between two women, this play remains a Kun Opera classic, still performed today.
In the play, Cui Jianyun, the wife of a young scholar, met a younger girl named Cao Yuhua. They quickly grew fond of each other. In the tenth chapter, “Mengxue” (Teasing a vow), the narrative of gender transformation through reincarnation was used by this couple to disentangle their emotions, envision their future, and position their identities in the relationship. To cement their close bond, these two women initiated an “engagement ceremony” at a shrine. Initially unsure and troubled by their female gender, the younger Miss Cao suggested to the older Cui that they should vow to become sisters. At first, Cui extended the vow by pushing boundaries of life and death: “Our vow should be different from the usual vows. Those usual ones only concern this life. We should include our next life in this vow.” After gaining Miss Cao’s agreement, step by step, Cui went on to push at the boundary of gender (“Who says we will always be women in our upcoming lives?”) and suggested they should vow to be “husband and wife in the next life.” A firm believer in reincarnation and supernatural forces capable of changing gender and granting marriage, Miss Cao pondered this in her mind: “Making a vow in front of the god is not something to make fun of. It is easy to vow as brothers or sisters, but being husband and wife is different. The shrine is not just a theater.” Soon her doubts were gone as she started picturing her female lover, Cui, in the mold of a man: “If she were to become a man [in the next life], as long as ‘he’ is as smart and good-looking as in this life, I am willing to become ‘his’ wife. I hope that in the next life ‘he’ won’t change the romantic and forward way, so that I won’t have much to lose!” With the promise of gender transformation through reincarnation, the previous uncertainty Miss Cao held regarding their female gender diminished, and the questions posed by their unconventional female-female union were cleared up. This possibility of gender transformation allowed this female-female couple to redefine their gender and family identities within this relationship and, more importantly, to resituate their positionality with regard to each other.
After Cao accepted Cui’s marriage proposal in the next life, they decided that since they were to become husband and wife, they should look the part and bow to each other, as a couple being married would do at a wedding, “so that the Bodhisattva can see this as proof and would not change her mind in the next life.” Although Cao had already imagined the forward and proactive Cui as her husband, they were still yet to officially agree on which one of them would be the man. To decide this, they both tried on Cui’s husband’s clothes and caps to see who would look more like a groom. The male clothes were too big for Cao but happened to fit Cui perfectly. Cui had imagined herself as a male lover of Cao since they met each other. Cui then stated: “I am one year older. I definitely should be the husband.” With Cui dressing as a man and bowing to the bride, a temporary and symbolic gender transformation, a taste of what they would have in the next life, was realized. Such gender-transforming sensibilities of one lover in a female-female relationship being seen as a different-gendered figure also resemble the perceptions of one of the lovers in a male-male relationship as a woman trapped in the wrong male body, like the actor Fang Junguan and the character Liang Yun analyzed above.
Furthermore, such sensibilities in emphasizing the mismatched gender of only one partner rather than both, as revealed through the reincarnation depiction, can also challenge and disrupt the homogenizing modern, Western sexual identity of “homosexuality.” Having emerged in a binary opposition against “heterosexuality” in late nineteenth-century Europe, the singular category “homosexuality,” as a “personage,” “species,” and “sexual orientation,” could risk overlooking the different gender expressions or different sexual desires based on these different gender expressions between two “homosexual” partners in a same-sex relationship. Individuals could be grouped in the same category due to their sexual acts. Meanwhile, this sexual orientation relied on and emphasized the “stable” and the same gender between “homosexual” individuals. By contrast, the gender-transforming sensibilities made possible by reincarnation thought can help us to dissect how partners in a same-sex relationship were understood to articulate their emotional bonds and desires toward each other based on each other’s different, rather than the same, gender expressions. For instance, in Li Yu’s play, through following or, more precisely, role-playing the conventions and rituals of husband and wife, with Cui in men’s attire playing the man’s role and Cao looking beautiful in her feminine way, they suddenly felt affectionate and aroused, as Cui said: “Although I am not a real man, having dressed like this and seeing your adorable face, I could not help but feel frivolous and carried away…. And I am not the only one being frivolous. Your emotions of lust are feeling tingling too.” This showcases that although Cao and Cui remained a same-sex couple based on their biological sex, they were not driven by the same “homosexual” desire. The sexual tensions and intimate bond between them were heightened by their performance and the dynamic of a different-gender couple, as Cui was aroused by Cao’s biological femininity and Cao by Cui’s masculinity, achieved through cross-dressing and the promise of reincarnation, instead of being aroused by their same female gender or sex. Finally, the chapter ends with this couple having sex: “Two flows of plum blossom scent passed when their trousers were off. How come there wasn’t a cun of plum blossom stick? Only empty interactions between yacha ([phrase omitted], Y-shaped folks) were made, rubbing the plum blossom nests and leaving them tickly.” Again, the sex between them was described and evaluated based on understandings of heterosexual intercourse. Judged in a heteronormative and phallocentric manner, it was considered as unsatisfying, due to the lack of a proper man, or a phallus. Temporary cross-dressing became somehow inadequate, since Cui had yet to reach her permanent and biological transformation into a man through reincarnation.
Conclusion
This article has analyzed the supernatural construction of gender nonnormativity, including unexplained gender transformation, intersex bodies, and unregulated same-sex relationships, in the context of late imperial gender, family, and social systems. Through three main supernatural narratives—retribution, reward, and reincarnation—these gender transgressions were made intelligible and incorporated into the existing power structure as they were linked with or interpreted through the dominant family values and orthodox gender norms of the human world. The supernatural world was considered to be intrinsically linked to the human world, and supernatural forces were constructed as an arbiter of these orthodox gender norms.
Furthermore, these different modes of supernatural construction also showcased how gender nonnormativity could be perceived differently when it was performed by individuals of different gender, social, and family identities. For example, men going through unexplained gender transformation tended to be depicted negatively as retribution, while a positive tone of reward was deployed when it came to describing women going through similar events. Also, one partner within a same-sex relationship tended to be understood as a gender-transforming figure through association with reincarnation, while the other was not. In addition to highlighting the differences, the commonality and connections among certain supernatural constructions also reveal that people’s perceptions of these various types of nonnormativity were interrelated and sometimes even intersecting. Recurring motifs and plots, including dreams, underworld judges, and the loss and gain of male genitals, also reflected deeper logics and sensibilities regarding these transgressive figures, including a phallocentric emphasis on understanding gender transformation and intersex bodies, as well as predestined understandings of gender-transforming individuals and same-sex desires.
With these supernatural elements being overlooked in existing scholarship on Chinese queer history, the rereading of queer history through a supernatural lens in this article thus foregrounds a series of new and pressing questions for contemporary scholars, as well as for the larger queer community: Have these perceptions of gender nonnormativity influenced by the supernatural been completely replaced by a modern, Western epistemology and its gender and sexual categories, or have they become intertwined with other, different systems? To what extent are these perceptions still prevalent in China or the Sinophone world today? To what extent have similar sensibilities been internalized, or are they still possessed by queer people themselves? And how can the sensibilities revealed through these supernatural constructions, especially gender transformation achieved through reincarnation to redefine same-sex relationships, help us to decolonize and de-Eurocentricize the homonormative mode of writing queer sexualities and their histories?