AHR Forum
Gender and Manhood in Chinese History

The five pieces that follow take up the challenge of showing that the activities of men, no less than of women, have a gendered dimension and a gendered history. They do this by focusing primarily on various kinds of relationships between men in China from imperial times on up through the 1940s. The Forum is book-ended by two general pieces by senior scholars in Chinese and European studies, respectively. It opens with an overview essay by Susan Mann, who has published extensively on Chinese women's history, and who introduces non-Sinologists to the basic contours of the historical and historiographic landscape, while also adding a new perspective to ongoing debates relating to gender in China that has something to offer to specialists and nonspecialists alike. The Forum closes with a comparative comment by Robert A. Nye, who is known largely for his work on notions of masculinity in nineteenth-century France and has worked as well on the history of sexuality in the West. Between these two essays come three empirically grounded case studies, which make use of everything from court documents to texts by Confucian philosophers. The first case study, by Norman Kutcher, looks at friendships between men and makes the provocative claim that, in many ways, nonsexual affective bonds of this sort (which tended to be egalitarian) were more threatening to the traditional Chinese social order than were relationships we would now label homosexual (which tended to be hierarchical in nature). The second case study, by Adrian Davis, explores the curious fact that, while China is often described as a place where familial harmony was all-important, brothers not all that infrequently killed one another. The third, by Lee McIsaac, turns from biological to fictive forms of fraternity, looking at the many social and cultural meanings of sworn brotherhoods in a Chinese city in the middle of the twentieth century.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.