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

After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China, based on the author's Princeton University doctoral dissertation, is the first monograph-length historical account of transformations that both established and challenged sexual binaries in the Sinosphere from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It is wide ranging and ambitious in its themes and scholarly engagements.

A succinct introduction surveys the work's narrative arc: Howard Chiang posits a "genealogical relationship" (7) between palace eunuchs, men castrated to qualify for service in imperial households since China's early dynasties, and Cold War–era sexual reassignment, which saturated the Taiwanese press under the Nationalist (Guomindang) Party after its retreat from the Communist-ruled mainland in 1949. The connection, Chiang argues, was a transformation in ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender between the 1920s and the 1940s. Chiang sees this shift as comparable to Michel Foucault's model of the rise of scientia sexualis, ¹ anchored by state power and scientific/medical expertise, in modern Europe. In China, too, new notions about sex grew symbiotically with nationalistic ideas about the naturalness of "China."

The opening chapter focuses on representations of eunuchs from the late Qing empire (1644–1912) to the Republic of China (1912–1949). The nineteenth-century court was forced by military and diplomatic reversals to grant increasing concessions to foreign states and individuals. Eunuchs surfaced in venues from expatriate European medical experts' publications to the emergent Chinese news media; Chiang also cites published recollections by eunuchs themselves. The ambiguity of what castration entailed and self-contradictory characterizations of eunuchs, including those who had self-castrated, Chiang contends, did not stop either foreign observers or increasingly nationalistic Chinese commentators from linking castrated bodies with China's weakness and backwardness, paralleling the contemporaneous condemnation of female footbinding as symptomatic of "the sick man of Asia."

Chiang's subsequent chapters take up three facets of the transformation of Chinese sexuality and gender across the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century: "visibility," "new layers of visual evidence that made it possible for sex to become an object of observation" (71); "carnality," would-be sexological experts' debates about desire in the urban press; and "malleability," knowledge about sex hormones and intersexuality that made it possible to imagine any human body changing sex. [End Page E-6]

Chapter 2 charts three phases of visualizing sex in textbooks and other texts of scientific expertise; they explain "how and why Western biological notions of sex" became the intellectual default (107; emphasis original). A novel "anatomical aesthetic" emphasized mapping organs and tissues and defining sexual difference physiologically. Next came "morphological sensibility," which compared male and female animals, drawing links to human sexual difference. Finally, Chiang describes the "subcellular gaze," which construed chromosomes and gonadal tissues as proof of sexual dimorphism.

Chapter 3 documents "epistemic modernity" (129–33) in the new field of sexual science, mainly through writings by French-trained philosopher Zhang Jingsheng (張競生 1888–1970) and American-educated eugenicist Pan Guangdan (潘光旦 1898–1967) and responses thereto in the urban media. Chiang calls sexological discourse "heterogenous—and perhaps even ambiguous" (158) though it reified the "science" of sex and the authority of scientific expertise. Debates over the category of homosexuality and its threat or value to modern Chinese society illustrate this point. Sexologists formulated "homosexuality" as a totalizing identity distinct from older status- and performance-based understandings even as they projected it anachronistically backward.

In chapter 4, Chiang traces an unprecedentedly fluid view of sexual difference. A hormonal conception of sex based on Euro-American research prevailed among Chinese intellectuals by the 1940s. Chiang takes the 1935 coverage of Yao Jinping (姚錦屏 ca. 1915–?) to exemplify the flexibility of sex in this endocrinological perspective. Yao, a young woman, claimed to have undergone "physical sex change" literally overnight (209) media, doctors, and the army general who had commanded her missing father...