Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader

A great collection of insights from many angles on gender in China. The articles touch on the changing faces of law, crime, medicine, obscenity, rebellion, pollution, romance, and more. Through it all, we have a drama of conflicting visions for better relations between the sexes. We have a longing for equality, but with rapidly changing images of what equality looks like. It's a helpful comparison with similar developments in the West.

I'm not a sociologist or a gender-studies person. I have studied Chinese and China for several years, from various angles. I picked up this book to learn more about historical concepts of what is "masculine" and "feminine" in China. If that bores you, so will this book. However, if you're looking for an introduction to historical ideas of gender in China, this is a good choice. Admittedly, some parts of this book are dry, but overall I found it an engrossing read. The book is broken up into parts. Each part has two subsections, looking at the topic from the "feminine" angle and the "masculine" angle. The chapters are: Gender and the Law (Qing dynasty), Ideals of Marriage and Family (Mid-Qing and Early Republican era), Gender and Literary Traditions (May Fourth to Reform era), Dangerous Women and Dangerous Men (A look at prostitutes and bandits from the late Ming to the Communist period), The Gender of Rebels (The Cultural Revolution), The Gendered Body (health practices and medicine in the Qing and Reform era), Shifting Gender Contexts in the Reform Era, and finally Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity (Reform Era). I enjoyed reading about Gender and the Law, Marriage and Family, Dangerous Women and Men, and the Gendered Body. Each of these chapters featured a lot of content, helpful background information, and substantive arguments about the topic at hand. Some chapters (literary traditions, especially) dragged, and lacked background information and content. For all chapters, a basic understanding of Chinese history and intellectual movements is a must--this is not an introduction to these movements. This book is a historical reader--it doesn't look much at recent gender roles, although it isn't supposed to. But if you want to know how "maleness" and "femaleness" were represented historically in late-to-early modern Chinese history, it's a good read.