Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered by Francesca Bray (review)

In her latest book, Francesca Bray presents a concise synthesis of her research on everyday technologies that shaped the lives of men and women in premodern China. Down to the title, the new work appears similar to Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (1997). It covers some of the same ground in the chapters that explore technologies associated with women and define their space in the architecture of houses, their work in textile production, and their reproductive task in childbearing. Each of the eight chapters of the new book is in fact based on earlier work, as indicated in the permissions. Yet the whole is more than the sum of its parts, in scope, depth, and perspective; it assembles central aspects in male and female worlds in practical everyday life, society, and political ideology.

Bray begins with a famous series of pictures and poems on rice cultivation and sericulture, the Gengzhi tu. The original work was presented to the Southern Song emperor shortly after northern China was lost to the Jurchen Jin. The subject soon became popular and was re-created through the late imperial period. Rather than reading the pictures either as fine art or as technical illustration, Bray discusses the series in different contexts, revealing layers of meaning and their changes over time: an early and locally specific depiction of rice cultivation and sericulture acquired political and practical meaning in the hope for restoring peace and for a southern identity. In later centuries, the iconic status of rice and silk being firmly rooted, the applied technical and social content retreated, while the ideal order that comprised peace and plenty, work of men and women, roles of rulers and subjects, was enhanced. The strength of Bray’s work is bringing together material realities and practices with political morality and social norms. She succeeds in providing moments of the actual feel of a culture of the past as well as an understanding of its complexity.

Departing from the conventional, illogical usage of “gender studies” as meaning “studies of women,” Bray explores technologies associated with women and men, which she terms gynotechnics and androtechnics. The first two chapters investigate patterns of life defined by the layout of houses, gender roles, and the different responsibilities in society reflected in instructive landscapes of diligent work. Three chapters on gynotechnics analyze textile technologies, the womanly sphere in the house, and child-bearing. The concluding three on androtechnics focus on writing and the transmission of knowledge, agronomy, and farming. The juxtaposition of worlds of women and men highlights how little can be made visible of women’s lives even by a scholar of the caliber of Bray. Many questions concerning the economic role of women and such highly private aspects of life as pregnancies and childbearing have to remain open. By contrast, the analysis of works on agriculture by officials and by private authors results in a picture of surprising concreteness.

The author carefully places the Chinese experience in a comparative context. The long introduction that reconceptualizes technology in pre-modern societies and the careful explanations of core concepts throughout the text ensure that the book is accessible to readers unfamiliar with East Asia. It opens up an understanding of a past that provides alternatives to hegemonic Western readings of society, history, and technology.

Criticisms can be made, but they are minor: there are a few repetitions and some other traces of having reworked existing texts. While the section on women is more specific about daily life, that on men focuses more on elites, gaining concreteness mostly in discussions of the men who wielded the brush rather than those who planted the fields. I have issues with the title and the cover for evoking expectations that do not quite fit the book inside. The cover and the term gender suggest another book on women, while “imperial China” is rather too general for the studied period from [End Page...