Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Chiang, Howard, 1983- author.

Title After eunuchs : science, medicine, and the transformation of sex in modern China / Howard Chiang
Published New York : Columbia University Press, [2018]

Copies

Description 1 online resource (xvii, 391 pages) : illustrations
Contents Acknowledgments -- Introduction: towards a genealogy of sex -- China castrated -- Vital visions -- Deciphering desire -- Mercurial matter -- Transsexual Taiwan -- Conclusion: China trans formed -- List of abbreviations -- Bibliography
Summary For much of Chinese history, the eunuch stood out as an exceptional figure at the margins of gender categories. Amid the disintegration of the Qing Empire, men and women in China began to understand their differences in terms of modern scientific knowledge. In After Eunuchs, Howard Chiang traces the genealogy of sexual knowledge from the demise of eunuchism to the emergence of transsexuality, showing the rise of new epistemic structures to be central to the formation of Chinese modernity. From anticastration discourses in the late Qing era to sex-reassignment surgeries in Taiwan in the 1950s and queer movements in the 1980s and 1990s, After Eunuchs explores the ways the introduction of Western biomedical sciences transformed normative meanings of gender, sexuality, and the body in China. Chiang investigates how competing definitions of sex circulated in science, medicine, vernacular culture, and the periodical press, bringing to light a rich and vibrant discourse of sex change in the first half of the twentieth century. He focuses on the stories of gender and sexual minorities themselves, as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, philosophers, educators, reformers, journalists, and tabloid writers, as they debated the questions of political sovereignty, national belonging, cultural authenticity, scientific modernity, human difference, and the power and authority of truths about sex. Theoretically sophisticated and far-reaching, After Eunuchs is an innovative contribution to the history and philosophy of science and queer and Sinophone studies
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes In English
Online resource, title from digital title page (viewed on August 17, 2020)
Subject Gender identity -- China
Sex role -- China
Gender identity.
Social perception.
Gender Identity
Social Perception
Transsexualism -- history
Sexual and Gender Minorities -- history
Castration -- history
Sex Reassignment Procedures -- history
sex role.
HISTORY -- Asia -- China.
Social perception
Gender identity
Sex role
SUBJECT China https://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/D002681
Subject China
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780231546331
0231546335