Kinship, Male Bonds, and Masculinity in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

As SUSAN MANN EXPLAINS in her introductory essay to this Forum, the emergence of gender as a subject in Chinese history has been retarded by the real and symbolic power that has inhered in gender relations in China for a couple of millennia. The unbroken periods of dynastic peace that graced that vast and diverse land were the product of a system of political domination and moral orthodoxy that depended on and reinforced patriarchy, patrilineality, and patrimony. In dialectical fashion, historians of China first concerned themselves with the women whose positions at the bottom of the gender hierarchy were determined by sex before they turned their attention to the men who exploited and dominated them. The same order of discovery in North American and European history stimulated a singular interest in women's history and some understandable suspicion that the history of men and masculinity was a trumped-up apology for patriarchy. The first efforts to find a common ground for the historical analysis of gender began in the 1980s and have continued apace, aided by imaginative work in cultural studies, the social sciences, feminist theory, and gay and lesbian studies.1 Historians of China have been tapping into much of this work for some time; judging by the excellent essays in this AHR Forum, they are navigating the complexities of gender history with assurance and expertise, despite a still-modest foundation of monographic research. This work demonstrates that the study of the bonds that united men in varying degrees of harmonious rivalry is an excellent way to get purchase on a set of broader themes that illuminate men's relations to women and NeoConfucian ideals of the family, as well as to assess their responses to the vicissitudes of the economy and state power. My own field of specialization is modern European history, most recently the history of sexuality. What follows is not comparative history in any strict sense but a modest effort to assess these contributions to the history of men and masculinity in China from a Euro-American perspective. As historians of the West have learned, if one investigates some aspect of gender or sexuality as an isolated phenomenon, one risks distorting its meaning in socio-cultural context. Ironically, this danger is greatest, perhaps, in kinship studies, where the aim is to map kin, property, and power relationships in particular societies in comprehensive, interlocking patterns. As all these essays demonstrate,