Sex/xing性/yin淫 and translation as “thing-in-between”: the reconfiguration of sex/gender knowledge in late Qing China

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how certain conceptual frameworks functioned as mediation to reconfigure the sex/gender knowledge formations in late Qing China by looking into three instances of translation: First, it explores certain historical traces of the English word “sex” and the Chinese Character “xing” 性, before the equivalence in translation was established, to examine the knowledge discourse’s mediating function. Second, it discusses an instance prior to the Chinese translation of “sex” being generalized and fixed to be “xing,” where the early modern thinker Tan Sitong in Ren Xue used the word “yin” 淫 to bring out the content of modern notion of “sex.” Third, it traces the context of Ma Junwu’s translation of John Stuart Mill to observe the remnants of the concealed interconnection between this “liberal-feminist theorist,” as viewed from the feminist categorization today, and socialism. Through these remains, this paper demonstrates how “mediation” brings about certain configurations of knowledge while obscuring certain facts and relations. It also borrows Lu Xun’s concept of “thing-in-between” (zhongjianwu; 中間物) to explain how these knowledge formations are oftentimes mediated by the scheme of modern-tradition binary constituted by Western modernity. This mediated knowledge itself then turns around to mediate the relationship between the modern and the traditional as it gets localized in its particular context.