In Sexuality and the Rise of China Travis S. K. Kong examines the changing meanings of same-sex identities, communities, and cultures for young Chinese gay men in contemporary Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China. Drawing on ninety life stories, Kong’s transnational queer sociological approach shows the complex interplay between personal biography and the dramatically changing social institutions in these three societies. Kong conceptualizes coming out as relational politics and the queer/tongzhi community and commons as an affective, imaginative means of connecting, governed by homonormative masculinity. He shows how monogamy is a form of cruel optimism and envisions state and sexuality intertwining in different versions of homonationalism in each location. Tracing the alternately diverging and converging paths of being young, "Chinese," gay, and male, Kong reveals how both Western and emerging inter- and intra- Asian queer cultures shape queer/tongzhi experiences. Most significantly, at this historical juncture characterized by the rise of China, Kong criticizes the globalization of sexuality by emphasizing inter-Asia modeling, referencing, and solidarities and debunks the essentializing myth of Chineseness, thereby decolonizing Western sexual knowledge and demonstrating the differential meanings of Chineseness/queerness across the Sinophone world.

What was sex like in China, from imperial times through the post-Mao era? The answer depends, of course, on who was having sex, where they were located in time and place, and what kind of familial, social, and political structures they participated in. This collection offers a variety of perspectives by addressing diverse topics such as polygamy, pornography, free love, eugenics, sexology, crimes of passion, homosexuality, intersexuality, transsexuality, masculine anxiety, sex work, and HIV/AIDS. Following a loose chronological sequence, the chapters examine revealing historical moments in which human desire and power dynamics came into play. Collectively, the contributors undertake a necessary historiographic intervention by reconsidering Western categorizations and exploring Chinese understandings of sexuality and erotic orientation.

This is the first nationwide survey of sexual behavior in China, which, in the meantime, has been widely acclaimed as the "Chinese Kinsey Report." The report was planned and supervised by four sex researchers leading a team of 40 assistants and over 500 field workers over a 15-month period. They obtained over 20,000 completed questionnaires from all parts of China, northern and southern, rural and urban. The voluminous book caused a sensation not only in the People's Republic, but also in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It provided a first glimpse of a hitherto hidden aspect of life in China. A groundbreaking survey -- nothing more or less than the Kinsey report of modern China. Sexual Behavior in Modern China: Report on the Nationwide Survey of 20,000 Men and Women.

Gender and sexuality have been neglected topics in the history of Chinese civilization, despite the fact that there is a massive amount of historical evidence on the subject. China's late imperial government was arguably more concerned about gender and sexuality among its subjects than any other pre-modern state. How did these and other late imperial legacies shape twentieth-century notions of gender and sexuality in modern China? Susan Mann answers this by focusing on state policy, ideas about the physical body and notions of sexuality and difference in China's recent history, from medicine to the theater to the gay bars; from law to art and sports. More broadly, the book shows how changes in attitudes toward sex and gender in China during the twentieth century have cast a new light on the process of becoming modern, while simultaneously challenging the universalizing assumptions of Western modernity.

Since the early 1980s sex and sexuality have become prominent themes of public debate in China, after three decades during which discourses on sexuality were subject to stringent ideological controls. This book analyses the ways in which sex and sexuality have been discussed in The People's Republic of China since 1949. It examines a wide range of materials - the official and popular press, women's magazines, sex education publications, self-help guides and medical advice pamphlets - and compares and contrasts the various discourses of sexuality and the meanings associated with 'woman' that emerge from them. It considers the role of the state in matters of sexuality, and argues that women's sexuality has been consistently targeted as a site for the regulation of general standards of sexual and social conduct. This is a highly original contribution to the growing body of literature on women and gender in China. It will appeal to students and scholars of modern and contemporary China, and to all those engaged in current debates about sexuality and gender in international feminist scholarship.

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 the language of modern science. In After Eunuchs, Howard Chiang traces the genealogy of sexual knowledge from the demise of eunuchism to the emergence of transsexuality, showing the centrality of new epistemic structures 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 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.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015 Sex in China introduces readers to some of the dramatic shifts that have taken place in Chinese sexual behaviours and attitudes, and public discussions of sex, since the 1980s. The book explores what it means to talk about sex in present-day China, where sex and sexuality are more and more visible in everyday life. Elaine Jeffreys and Haiqing Yu situate Chinas changing sexual culture, and how it is governed, in the socio-political history of the Peoples Republic of China. They demonstrate that Chinese governmental authorities and policies do not set out strictly to repress sex; they also create spaces for the emergence of new sexual subjects and subjectivities. They discuss the complexities surrounding the ongoing explosion of commentary on sex and sexuality in the PRC, and the emergence of new sexual behaviours and mores. Sex in China offers clear, critical coverage of sex-related issues that are a focus of public concern and debate in China - chapters focus on sex studies; marriage and family planning; youth and sex(iness); gay, lesbian and queer discourses and identities; commercial sex; and HIV/AIDS. This book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars both of modern China and of sex and sexualities, who wish to understand the role that sex plays in contemporary China.

In globalizing Asia, sexual mores and gender roles are in constant flux. How have economic shifts and social changes altered and reconfigured the cultural meanings of gender and sexuality in the region? How have the changing political economy and social milieu influenced and shaped the inner workings and micro-politics of family structure, gender relationships, intimate romance, transactional sex, and sexual behaviors? This volume offers up-to-date, grounded, critical analysis of the complex intersections of gender, sexuality, and political economy across a diverse array of Asian societies: China, Japan, Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan. Based on intense ethnographic fieldwork, the chapters disentangle the ways in which gendered and sexual experiences are impinged upon by state policies, economic realities, cultural ideologies, and social hierarchies. Whether highlighting intimate relationships between elite businessmen and their mistresses in China; nightclub performances by Thai men in Bangkok; single women’s views of romance, motherhood, and marriage in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo; or male same-sex relationships in Pakistan—each chapter centers around the stories of the gendered subjects themselves and how they are shaped by outside forces. Taken together they provide a provocative entrée into the cultural politics of gender and sexuality in Asia. By foregrounding cross-cultural ethnographic research, this volume sheds light on how configurations of gender and sexuality are constituted, negotiated, contested, transformed, and at times, perpetuated and reproduced in private, intimate experiences. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, political science, and women’s and LGBTQ studies.

After decades of near silence on the matter, sex is being talked about in China. But what is being said? Who is allowed to speak? And whose purposes are being served? This ground-breaking book takes a critical look at how sex in China is thought and talked about. Drawing on the work of the country’s foremost sex experts, and years of research in the field, it gives an overview of the sexual landscape in China today. Including new material on transsexuals, fetishism, sex aids and pornography, the book shows that the dominant ways of thinking about sex are neither innocent nor inconsequential, and that amid catalogues of prescriptions linking self-management to the collective good, people are making decisions about how to live their sexual lives. The most lively and accessible critique of sexual discourse, this book will be essential reading for scholars in Chinese studies, cultural studies and sexuality and gender studies.

This book offers the first ethnographic account of the experiences of highly educated young professional women, hailed by the Chinese media as ‘white-collar beauties’. It exposes the organizational mechanisms – naturalization, objectification and commodification of women – that wield gendered and sexual control in post-Mao workplaces. Whilst men benefit from symbolic and bureaucratic power, women professionals skilfully enact indirect power in a game of domination and resistance. The sources of women’s subversion are grounded in their only-child upbringing which breaks the patrilineal base of familial patriarchy fostering an unprecedented ambition in personal development, gender as inherently relational and a role-oriented system, and inner-outer cultural boundaries as signifiers of moral agency. This raises a new feminist inquiry about the agents for social change. Through a nuanced analysis grounded in the socio-cultural locality, this book throws fresh light upon the ways in which gender, sexuality and power could be theorized beyond a Euro-American reality.