Divine, Demonic, and Disordered: Women without Men in Song Dynasty China by Hsiao-wen Cheng

Abstract

Hsiao-wen Cheng. Divine, Demonic, and Disordered: Women without Men in Song Dynasty China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, .  pp. Paperback $., ISBN . Divine, Demonic, and Disordered: Women without Men in Song Dynasty China focuses on manless women in medieval China. This book reveals how little we know about women in this period, and also challenges the presumed concepts of gender and sexuality in modern society. Hsiao-wen Cheng argues that the normalization of heterosexuality was rare in pre-Song and Song sources. The book’s main claim is not only inspiring for those who study gender history but also yields insights for modern discussions about gender, sexuality, and normalcy. The author explores diverse sources from Song dynasty China, including but not limited to medical treatises, bedchamber texts, hagiographies, and popular tales. With a background in literature, Cheng offers new perspectives on these primary sources. Historical documents were written as narratives, stories told with specific purposes, framed with certain values and worldviews, and situated in particular historical settings. The book contains elegant translations of fascinating stories, which will be helpful for future studies. During the Song dynasty, a number of different sources discussed or featured manless women; these works have not been fully examined in previous scholarship. This book helps to fill that gap by offering an insightful examination of this topic from various angles. “Manless women” is a concept that does not fit with modern classifications of sexual identity or sexual orientation, nor was it an established concept in premodern Chinese sources. Nevertheless, the term manless women focuses our attention on women’s desire for men and helps to distinguish the conventional coupling of sexual desire and marriage. It therefore challenges the assumed dichotomy of male fantasy and female resistance. The book offers a more complete picture of women’s lives in premodern China by discovering the private thoughts of women. The introduction emphasizes that the sex-desire-procreation linkage was a special focus in Chinese medical history, and this topic must be understood within the context of Song medical culture. The book unfolds in three parts. Part one examines medicine and illness relating to gendered identity. Chapter  mainly analyzes discussions by two Song dynasty physicians. In particular, Reviews©  by University of Hawai‘i Press Chen Ziming’s theory of guafu combined Confucian classics with medicine texts and elevated the sex-desire-procreation linkage to a higher level. Women’s sexual desire for men became natural in Chen’s work. This chapter highlights a potential contradiction between “women without men will become sick” and “young widows should remain chaste” (pp. , ). The second chapter examines intercourse with ghosts in medical and Daoist contexts, and also analyzes how bedchamber texts connected heterosexual inactivity with ghostly intercourse. The discussion of bu yu jian ren (does not want to meet people) reveals a concern during the Song dynasty about women losing interest in men. Part two deals with the disordered. These two chapters examine recurring motifs in narratives about enchanted women—seclusion, indifference to one’s husband, and superfluous self-adornment. Chapter  examines the enchantment disorder in pre-Song tales, and the following chapter focuses more on the Song dynasty. Both chapters contain thought-provoking discussions about historical narratives. Cheng calls attention to a characteristic of Song dynasty anecdotes, “multivocalness.” While discussing Hong Mai’s Record of Listeners, Cheng provides a summary of the current scholarship and points out two kinds of narratological ambiguity in Hong Mai’s collections: the meta-anomaly and the fantastique. The discussion of “amateurs’ narratives” is fascinating: this is a narrative type that creates sufficient tension for a good story and also reflects a contemporary distrust of professionals and disrespect for profit-making. The last part of the book focuses on female celibacy. Chapter  examines the renunciant identity and emphasizes the inseparability of who one is and what one does—shen (body) and xi (habits). Chapter  emphasizes unique aspects of female celibacy, constructs of sexuality, and the thoughts of celibate women. This analysis is intertwined with developments in Daoism and Buddhism, especially concerning how religious leaders cooperated with the family system by refraining from encouraging women to become...