Gender, Body Politics and Sexual Morality in Three Late Ming Homoerotic Stories.

This article examines 'Qinglie ji' ... (A Story of Sacrificing Love), 'Qingqi ji' ... (A Story of Extraordinary Love) and 'Yueji' ... (The Moon) written by the author known as Zui xihu xinyue zhuren ... (Moon-heart Master of the Drunken West Lake) in the seventeenth century. The analysis considers how the physical body of the passive partner is exploited as both emotional and moral sites in which gender norms and orthodox sexual morality are upheld. I use the yin-yang ... paradigms, as conceptualised by Confucianised and traditional Chinese medical discourses, as my analytical tools to examine gender representation in these three stories. My study aims to illuminate the convergence of these two theories, both of which drive a conservative literary discourse on the morality of homoeroticism in late imperial China. The discussion shows that the representation of homoeroticism in these three stories duplicates the binary perception of gender and sexuality that is typical of a patriarchal society by revealing a predominance of the Confucianised yin-yang order over the traditional Chinese medical theory of bodily gender. In this way, same-sex desire is regulated and homoerotic pleasure is contained within social boundaries and a moral system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]