Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (review)

Despite a sweeping title, Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture, based on the author's doctoral thesis, is more narrowly focused on the masculinity of the caizi, translated by the author as "fragile scholar" (more accurately, "talented scholar"), who is the male protagonist found in a minor genre of Chinese literature, the "talented scholar meets beautiful girl" romantic fiction and drama. Student Zhang is the archetypal fragile scholar in the early-fourteenth-century drama Western Wing, itself based on an eighth-century short story, The Story of Yingying. His masculinity is characterized by a handsome demeanor, physical weakness, androgynous and effeminate looks, literary talent, heterosexual orientation, and persistence to the point of setting aside the civil service examinations and kneeling before a maid to pursue and consummate his love and yearning for the attractive girl, Yingying.

Song chiefly uses textual analysis to locate the constitution of the fragile scholar in the masculinity of elite men within a broader historical context, from the time of Confucius in 500 bce to the eighteenth century. Supported by a large array of selected literary and classical sources spanning over two thousand years, from The Book of Poetry to the eighteenth-century novel The Dream of the Red Chamber, he constructs two other masculinities driven by the mainstream ideology of Confucian patriarchy, that of the shi, the scholar-officials with education who were bound for a public office, and the junzi, men upholding morality and aspiring to public office, whom Song describes as the "signifier of the official masculinity in traditional China." In these two masculinities he accounts for the similarly submissive, effeminate voice of the fragile scholar by equating it with the "emasculation of the mind" of the official when he assumes the voice of women in addressing or writing poetry to their superiors and the rulers. Song is convincing when he traces this masculinity to the legendary Qu Yuan (ca. 300 bce), a paragon of loyalty and a major poet. But he is on shaky ground when he goes further back and includes The Book of Poetry's eunuchs, who were liminal and marginal individuals throughout the course of Chinese history. Student Zhang, the fragile scholar who temporarily rejects the Confucian prescriptive ideology, is seen as an alternate and ideal masculinity, a male fantasy with male voice and male perspective. After all, characters such as Student Zhang sprang from the imagination and literary production of the shi scholar-official class. But the fragile scholar's life course changes when he adopts Confucian ideology and protocol, passing the examinations and legitimizing his sexual tryst through parental- or ruler-sanctioned marriage. Song asserts that these two steps initiate Student Zhang into the desexualized and emasculated masculinities of the shi scholar-officials and of the junzi, the moral, public men, and he enters their public world and drops the private world of the fragile scholar. On the other hand, Baoyu from The Dream of the Red Chamber remains a fragile scholar and does not go through this initiation process.

To explain why this effeminate image of the fragile scholar was accepted without the homophobia characteristic of the West Song includes a chapter on homosexuality as an alternate masculinity in traditional China. He argues that the homosexual discourse, as in the literary representations of the astonishing beauty of legendary figures Song Yu and Pan An, became subsumed in heterosexual discourse. In fact, homosexual practice, known as nanfeng, or male-southern custom, was generally accepted due to the traditional Chinese conceptualization of gender as a yin (female) and yang (male) binary from which all individuals emerge with male and female components. Homosexuality was seen as a shifting masculinity or bisexuality as individuals later assumed the mainstream Confucian path of heterosexual marriage and siring of children.

The sexualized fragile scholar stands in sharp contrast to the desexualized macho male warriors in Three Kingdoms and Water Margin, historical novels written in the fourteenth century. At the...