After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China by Howard Chiang (review)

In his book After Eunuchs, Howard Chiang explores a genealogy of transsexuality in China that starts with the demise of eunuchism. More broadly, Chiang emphasizes the importance of sexual knowledge to Chinese modernity. Drawing on Foucault, Chiang approaches sex as an epistemic concept. The author situates the beginning of non-heteronormative sexual knowledge in China in the Republican period, rather than after China’s opening up post-1987. He therefore argues against historians such as Frank Dikötter to show that knowledge of sexual variation was introduced in China during the Republican period. Chiang’s investigation into non-heteronormative sexuality inadvertently turns into a history of science and biomedical medicine relating to sex, along with gendered interpretations, but also adds to the growing body of work on the history of translation by investigating the translation of Western sexological scientific texts.

The first chapter, “China Castrated,” explores the history of eunuchs in a manner apart from the predominant historiographical interpretation of their political importance at the imperial court. Instead, Chiang aims to show the eunuchs’ bodily experiences, as well as the gendered dimensions of eunuchism, especially its relationship with masculinity. In this chapter, Chiang draws heavily on Dorothy Ko and Angela Zito’s approach to foot-binding to move beyond condemnation of eunuchs and emphasize the multiplicity of the castration practice. Chiang also relies on Ko’s influential analysis of foot-binding to explain the relationship between visuality and bodily practices like castration. An investigation into castration practices also takes into consideration conceptions of masculinity and their relation to the body through an exploration of narratives of castration focusing on the cases of George Stent, Wu Chieh Ping, and Gu Fang-Lui. In his reading of Gu’s and Wu’s narratives, Chiang argues that the shift from castration to emasculation reflected a change from a cultural regime of the scrotum to a regime of the penis (32). In his view, this paradigm reflects the rise of psychoanalysis and the rising importance of desire in sexological investigations. Chiang shows that Chinese writers like Zhou Zuoren were well aware of the cultural meanings of castration in China, as opposed to Western eugenic sterilization. Thus, Zhou’s humanism led him to consider the Western refusal to destroy body parts more humane.

Furthermore, Chiang makes use of surprising materials, such as the memoir of controversial sinologue Edmund Bachhouse (1873–1944), which is closer to pornography than history. Chiang, however, does not look for historical authenticity, as the material is doubtful, but rather explores the connection between eunuchism and masculinity in an effort to present other narratives aside from the ubiquitous association of eunuchs with emasculation. Chiang reads Bachhouse’s supposed sexual encounter with a Chinese eunuch as an example of a more egalitarian sexual practice, and shows the praising of the eunuch’s masculinity (36–38). Dissatisfied with the dominant interpretation of castration as eliminating reproduction, Chiang explores other meanings, such as how the castration of the eunuch’s body reproduces eunuchs socially and culturally, or the systemic gendering of castration. Despite narratives of emasculation, most eunuchs retained their male gender, but eunuchism became undesirable in Republican China because it was interpreted by both Western critics and Chinese reformers as a symbol of China’s backwardness (60). Chiang argues that a regendering of eunuchs as feminized occurred away from the traditional view of them as male.

In the second chapter, Chiang further explores sex as biological, biomedical, and scientific knowledge. The author shows how Western biological knowledge of sex came to constitute new epistemological ground for authorizing claims about gender and body. Here, he demonstrates that Chinese reformers informed by the development of endocrinology believed in the theory of universal bisexuality. Thus, according to the writer Yang Youtian, author of the 1929 essay “The Problem of Homosexuality,” individuals had characteristics from both sexes (192). Chinese journalists and biologists wrote on hermaphroditism and on intersex individuals. Chiang uses sensationalist cases...