Distinguished Lectures in Humanities: The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China

Abstract

Through court cases, fiction, and late-Qing newspaper accounts, Matthew SOMMER’s new book considers a range of transgender experiences in Imperial China, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular contexts and penalized in others. People moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth in different ways and for many reasons. Eunuchs, boy actresses, and clergy left behind normative gender roles defined by family and procreation. Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupation such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit — yet, suspected of sexual predation, they risked death for the crime of “masquerading in women’s attire,” even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for years. SOMMER scrutinizes the ways authorities and literati understood gender-nonconforming people, contrasting official ideology with popular mentalities. An unprecedented account of China’s transgender histories, this book sheds new light on law, religion, medicine, literature, and culture.

About the speaker

Matthew H. SOMMER (BA Swarthmore, MA U. of Washington, PHD UCLA) is the Bowman Family Professor of History at Stanford University. He is the author of Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford 2000) and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China (California 2015), which was the inaugural winner of the American Society for Legal History’s Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. His latest book, The Fox Spirit, The Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia 2024) won the John Boswell Prize from the LGBTQ+ History Association.