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

After Eunuchs is a monumental study that rethinks China's modernity through the historical intersection of science and sexuality. If Confucian teachings have popularized the idea that appetites for sex are as much a part of human nature as craving food, Howard Chiang has turned those assumptions on their head. Skillfully reasoned with rich evidence, this book unravels the intricate processes through which the understandings and ramifications of sex moved beyond the innate essence for Chinese-speaking communities. Chiang argues that the circulation of biomedical, psychiatric, and sexological knowledge and thinking reformulated what sex (change) entailed. Concurrently, he outlines how public discourses reconceptualized sexual identities, homosexual and heterosexual desires, and surgical experiences intersected with China's geopolitical transfigurations.

The title of the book, After Eunuchs, evokes a key thread to tell the modern genealogy of sex change. In doing so, Chiang was less concerned with a straightforward chronology or geographical pivot. Rather, he weaves together historical junctures from nineteenth-century China to postwar Taiwan across five chapters. The opening chapter explores how foreign and domestic observers co-opted the declining practice of castration for public consumption and biomedical interpretations. While eunuchs' experiences varied throughout history, western physicians' scrutiny over their surgical and anatomical specifics redefined Chinese masculinity from emphasizing reproductive capabilities to a penis-centric morphological structure. The following three chapters examine the conceptual transformations in China that undergirded the fall of the eunuch system and its afterlife.

From chapters two to four, Chiang charts these changes by examining three aspects central to the knowledge production of sex. First, biological illustrations to visualize sexual differences in anatomical features, morphological traits, and chromosomal makeup objectified sex and inter-sexuality. If scientific images lent empirical universality to these new notions, they also facilitated how intellectuals conveyed the messages and reasonings through reincarnated Chinese words. For instance, by the 1920s, visualization enabled the comprehension of assigning sex to xing and sexual dimorphism to ci/xiong and nan/nü (97–101). Second, establishing western-style sexology as a discipline from the 1920s to the 1940s unleashed Chinese intellectual interests to document, debate, and diagnose sexual behaviours and desires. Chiang characterizes these phenomena as manifestations of what he terms as "epistemic modernity" (128–133). The convergence of pursuing scientific truth about sex (what Michel Foucault theorized as scientia sexualis) with Chinese cultural milieu exemplifies modernity in epistemology that transcended preexisting (homo-)eroticism (135–137). As Chiang suggests, it was amidst discourses among Chinese sexperts and their public correspondences with readers that the conceptualization of sexual identity and homosexuality emerged in China. Third, biochemical theories uncovered the pliability of sex and unlocked the possibility of sex change. In the 1930s, endocrinological research informed Chinese sexologists and medical communities that both male and female hormones existed in all humans. Hence, they began to entertain non-categorical perspectives such as universal bisexuality. In this context, sexually ambiguous bodies including eunuchs and hermaphrodites rekindled their interest to offer scientific explanations. Although Chinese scientists remained relatively cautious toward medical experimentations, media coverage and fictional portrayals tantalized the public to witness the miracle of altering sex through scientific advancements. The idea of changing sex for a Chinese person, however, did not materialize until the 1950s.

The final chapter shifts the spotlight to Taiwan to investigate an early Chinese case of sex reassignment procedures in the context of the Cold War. Comparing to Christine Jorgensen, an American transsexual icon, the Taiwanese press celebrated Xie Jianshun as her contemporary equivalent. Chiang's analyses highlight moments of "trans formation," when Xie's journey of sex reassignment involved a wide array of experiences transgressing gender, bodily, sexual, and social norms (238). This chapter allows Chiang to accomplish more than historicizing Chinese transsexuality, a tremendous feat on its own merit. He also uses Xie's case to exemplify the value of the Sinophone approach, emphasizing the lingual and cultural connections. Studies on modern...