Disgraceful Matters : The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth-Century China

"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."--BOOK JACKET 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. Acknowledgments......Page 10 A Note on Textual Conventions......Page 14 A Note on Dynasties and Reigns......Page 16 Introduction......Page 18 part one......Page 32 Prologue: A Chaste Barbarian Martyrs Herself on the Imperial Frontier......Page 34 1. Defining Gender Orthodoxy for a Multiethnic Empire......Page 42 2. Statecraft and Gender Order in the Qianlong Reign......Page 56 part two......Page 72 Prologue: A Righteous Husband Plays the Politics of the Wifely Way......Page 74 3. Enforcing Gender Order......Page 82 4. Divided Loyalties......Page 99 5. Adultery, Incest, and the Multiple Meanings of Patriarchy......Page 115 part three......Page 136 Prologue: A Compromised Widow Sacrifices Her Body to Defend Inner Virtue......Page 138 6. The Wages of Wanton Mixing......Page 150 7. “Accommodating Sages”......Page 171 part four......Page 182 Prologue: Male Impropriety and Female Outrage Lead to a Tragic End......Page 184 8. The Problem of Female Moral Agency......Page 194 9. The Logic of Female Suicide......Page 209 Epilogue......Page 228 Notes......Page 236 A Note on Archival Sources......Page 276 Character List......Page 278 Bibliography......Page 282 Index......Page 292

"An important contribution to the rapidly growing Chinese gender studies field. No other work has so persuasively demonstrated the significance of chastity in High Qing political, social and cultural lives as Theiss's investigation has done. The author's analyses are nuanced and her conclusions compelling. This is a particularly enlightening read."—Martin Huang, author of Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China

"Outstanding and timely, this book significantly advances our understanding of late imperial Chinese history on several fronts. Theiss tells us a great deal that is new about cultural attitudes of this era. Clear and lively, this is research of very high quality."—William T. Rowe, author of Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China

'Disgraceful Matters' presents a discussion of the political significance of a widespread cult of female chastity in 18th century China. Janet Theiss has studied the laws, legal cases regulations, & policies through which female virtue was defined enforced & contested In 1752, the eighteenth year of the Qianlong reign, a twenty-sui-old Miao woman named Wang Aguan, from a walled village in the Puan District of southwestern Guizhou Province, committed suicide after being sexually assaulted by her cousin, Wang Ali.