Birdwhistell, Joanne D., Mencius and Masculinities: Dynamics of Power, Morality and Maternal Thinking

Abstract

Joanne Birdwhistell’s book is an interesting and multi-layered study of the book of Mencius. Birdwhistell carefully teases out, and then proceeds to examine in some detail, the various elements of the feminine that shape Mencius’ philosophical and political views. To date, hers is the most thorough and in-depth treatment of the inherent, but subterranean, feminism in Mencius’ views. Birdwhistell’s first two chapters are concerned with scene-setting, and they provide an account of her chosen hermeneutic approach. She notes first that her book is not concerned with the masculine-feminine interplay in yinyang theory, but rather with how, in the Mencius, the feminine is appropriated into a masculine ideal. Her focus is primarily on the text in the Mencius, and her approach to this text is both subtle and careful. For instance, she notes that the Chinese philosophical tradition is subject to “various kinds of forgetting” so that “some ideas were embedded but remained unrecognized in the known texts, contained subversively in the texture of the texts’ explicit arguments” (8). One of her aims is to uncover these embedded ideas, all the more unacknowledged because they are concerned with the female and thus “silenced” within the Chinese patriarchal tradition. Her approach focuses less on the abstract ideas in the Mencius and more on the social relationships and practices embodied therein. For Birdwhistell, the text of Mencius is to be seen as a cultural landscape—that is, as expressive of the ways of living, the social practices and relationships that obtain at a particular time and place. These cultural and social contexts must be taken into account in order to decode the claims made within the text. Birdwhistell maintains that two key areas whose social practices receive significant attention in the Mencius are farming and ruling. In Chapters 3 and 4, she goes on to uncover two forms of masculinity rejected by Mencius. One form of masculinity—that espoused by followers of SHEN Nong—finds its expression within the agrarian context. Another form of masculinity—that displayed by King Hui—is expressed in the context of politics and governance. The first form of masculinity involves the “leveling down” of the Dao (2009) 8:457–460 DOI 10.1007/s11712-009-9134-9