The Culture of Sex in Ancient China (review)

Although there have been quite a number of publications in recent years on sexuality in Chinese history, these have focused mainly on the Ming and Qing dynasties. Paul Rakita Goldin, in The Culture of Sex in Ancient China, examines the historically important time from 500 B.C. to A.D. 400, offering a description of what he calls the "intellectual conceptions of sex" (or, in other words, the discourse of sex within the written culture), and presenting a precise analysis of sex and sexuality. Although he refers to an impressive corpus of literary sources, among them some of the most influential texts in the long Confucianist tradition, he makes it quite clear that his work does not offer a comprehensive history of sexuality and sexual behavior, since these sources do not provide sufficient information for this purpose (p. 1).

What does it mean to talk about "sex" in early Chinese thought? Only in recent decades have sex, gender, sexuality, and sexualities begun to be perceived as social constructs—due largely to the influence of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and his work The History of Sexuality. Sex is not now regarded as being biologically and universally determined but as requiring analysis within the various frames and borders that shape the wider cultural understanding of sex. Such frames and borders may be defined in terms of nation, history, dynasties, and cultures. Sex has thus been taken out of a biological and medical discourse and placed in a much broader context, so that the culture of sex has be to seen discursively within a framework of specific historical and cultural dimensions.

In his introduction, Goldin points out that although sex was a topic of central importance in early Chinese political culture, it has rarely, if ever, been considered in these terms either by those working in the Western sinological tradition or in commentaries by later Chinese thinkers—probably because their thinking to a large degree was often shaped by the Neo-Confucian thought of Zhu Xi (1130-1200).

Goldin has arranged the book in chronological order: each of the four parts, three chapters and an epilogue, focuses on one very specific topic to demonstrate the central message. In chapter 1, "Imagery of Copulation" (pp. 8-47), the image of copulation is taken as a metaphor for various human relations in differing political and social contexts; chapter 2, "Women and Sex Roles" (pp. 48-74), focuses on the Confucian view of women; and the third chapter, "Sex, Politics and Ritualization" (pp. 75-110), examines the new imperial ideology of the Qin and Han periods.

Goldin regards the methodology of the Culture of Sex in Ancient China as contrasting sharply with the methodological approaches used by Robert van Gulik (1910-1967), whose best-known work on Chinese sex culture, Sexual Life in Ancient China (1961), relied heavily on a positivist medical approach to sexuality. It should be kept in mind, however, that this medical approach formed the predominant "modern" understanding of sexuality, of sex and gender, for more than a century—not only in the "Western" world but also in Chinese societies, where medical approaches were treated for a long time as "modern and scientific"—and this approach is still thriving in many publications even today. Only recently have such approaches been challenged by postmodernist works that have built on the social-constructivist views of the 1970s and 1980s—queer theory and gender studies being the best-known academic terms. While it cannot be denied that the researcher's own views will always influence the methods and direction of research, Goldin maintains that an awareness of this fact can help to prevent a researcher from imposing his own conceptions on the past and on other cultures.

Goldin tries to avoid falling into this trap by considering how sex was regarded within the period of his research; he starts not with Western ideas but with the very specific Chinese concept of qi, which, being fundamental...