Gendered Violence and Women's Bodies: Transnational Perspectives

The three books under review, spanning a range of cultural contexts, historical chronologies, and geographies, focus on the complex and intricate relationships between embodied violence, gender, social relationships, and power. These concerns unite diverse texts investigating the chastity cult in China under the Qing dynasty, female infanticide in colonial and postcolonial India, and discourses on female circumcision in postcolonial Africa. Read in conjunction, these books present diverse insights into the manifold ways in which women's bodies as sites of symbolic capital and honor are both regulated and violated. They also speak to contemporary debates on questions of women's agency and subjectivity in contexts of gendered violence.

The most lucid and sophisticated book is Janet Theiss's Disgraceful Matters, a fascinating account of the connection between state formation, power, and women's chastity in Qing China between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries (1644–1944). Its main effort is to demonstrate the centrality of gender norms in the assertion of Qing political culture and power, with special reference to imperial discourses on women's chastity. With remarkable felicity, the author analyzes court records in which imperial officials adjudicated "disgraceful matters" pertaining to the family (domestic violence, adultery, rape, women's suicide) to illustrate how the state defined and regulated normative gender codes, and controlled women's bodies and sexuality. Theiss asserts that, unlike previous works on the chastity cult, hers aims to transcend the binaries of practice/precept to reflect on "how norms were defined, enacted, and wobbled/varied during their implementation" (5). She additionally contends that to understand the connections between prescription and practice, it is important to trace the various ways in which official strictures on chastity shaped everyday life and individual sensibilities. What makes Theiss's work especially pertinent is her investigation of how nonelite women engaged with the imperial cult. Here, by examining the traces of women's voices in court cases, she argues, in one of the more thought-provoking parts of the book, how state, community, and family efforts to stake claims to women's bodies were shaped by women's decisions and actions. Theiss persuasively argues that women engaged with institutionalized chastity norms in multiple ways that changed their meanings from within.

One of the book's central themes, traced to excellent effect, is the Qing state's efforts to regulate gender relations within families, as it embarked upon the civilizing of its subjects in a growing empire. Here, Theiss's framework provides an important contrast to the other two books, which give colonial and "modern" states primacy in inscribing violence on women's bodies and in articulating civilizing mission discourses. Her larger argument that early modern states were equally invested in monitoring gender norms is instructive for scholars seeking to write a long durée history of the relationship between gender and state formation. In this context, she persuasively argues that the regulation of "intimate life" in public was central to Qing empire building. Her finely crafted analysis demonstrates how the Qing state prescribed normative forms of moral and sexual behaviour for women based on the ideals of loyalty, obedience, and sexual fidelity. One of her important points is how the prowess of the state was equated with its ability to maintain normative social codes, enforce moral order, and keep "chaos" at bay. Women who killed themselves after being sexually compromised, molested, or raped were canonized by the state. The imperial chastity cult increasingly embraced nonelite women. What stands out here is Theiss's analysis of how the chastity cult...