Disgraceful matters : the politics of chastity in eighteenth-century China / Janet M. Theiss.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Theiss, Janet M., 1964-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chastity.

Women--China--Social conditions.

Women.

China.

Social conditions.

China--Social conditions--1644-1912.

Physical Description:

xv, 281 pages ; 24 cm

Other Title:

Politics of chastity in eighteenth-century China

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, [2004]

Summary:

Looking Beyond the familiar trappings of the cult of female chastity-such as hagiographies of widows and chastity shrines-in late imperial China, this book explores the cult's political significance and practical ramifications in everyday life during the eighteenth century. In the first full-length study of the subject, Janet Theiss examines a vast number of laws, legal cases, regulations, and policies to illustrate the social and political processes through which female virtue was defined, enforced, and contested. Along the way, she provides rich details of social life and cultural practices among ordinary Chinese people through narratives of criminal cases of sexual assault, harassment, adultery, and domestic violence.

Theiss begins by asking how and why the promotion of chastity became central to state-building and imperial expansion in the mid-Qing dynasty-a phenomenon she traces through the proliferation of laws, ritual regulations, and social policies designed to strengthen a social order founded on gender hierarchy and separation. In this new bureaucratic approach to regulating family life, we see a transformation of the imperial state's cultural ambitions and relationship to its subjects. However, Theiss argues, this mission to transform gender order was fraught with contradictory impulses, misreadings of social practice, and unintended consequences. Policymakers assumed that the defense of chastity was also a defense of patriarchal family authority. But as Theiss's reading of court documents and legal cases shows, female virtue and family hierarchy were routinely at odds in the lives of ordinary people, and the state chastity cult often had surprising implications for women's agency and family politics.

Contents:

part one * The Chastening State: The Qing Chastity Cult in Ritual,Law,and Statecraft

Prologue: A Chaste Barbarian Martyrs Herself on the Imperial Frontier

1 Defining Gender Orthodoxy for a Multiethnic Empire

2 Statecraft and Gender Order in the Qianlong Reign

part two * Female Virtue and the Politics of Patriarchy

Prologue: A Righteous Husband Plays the Politics of the Wifely Way

3 Enforcing Gender Order: Between the Ancestral Hall and the Yamen

4 Divided Loyalties: Natal Families and the Exercise of Patrilineal Authority

5 Adultery, Incest and the Multiple Meanings of Patriarchy

part three * Mapping Chastity across Boundaries of Body,Mind,and Space

Prologue: A Compromised Widow Sacrifices Her Body to Defend Inner Virtue

6 The Wages of Wanton Mixing: Violation and Gender Disorder

7 "Accommodating Sages": Gender Separation in Social Practice

part four * "Being a Person": Female Humiliation and Social Power

Prologue: Male Impropriety and Female Outrage Lead to a Tragic End

8 The Problem of Female Moral Agency

9 The Logic of Female Suicide.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-274) and index.

ISBN:

0520240332

OCLC:

55008321