Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (review)

Matthew Sommer's Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China is a superb study of sexual regulation and social change in the late imperial period. The focus of this densely packed analysis is the Qing period, but the study includes a much longer sweep of history that takes account of the origins of sexual regulation in the pre- and early empire periods and the pivotal changes that began to occur in Yuan times. The author's stated purpose is focused and practical: to show how legislation and central court practice worked to regulate sexuality (p. 2). But he in fact does much more. He approaches and "mines" imperial codes, commentaries, and actual court cases, like an ethnographer, to shed light on changes that intensified the importance of moral-ritual issues related to the family and its crucial role as a social anchor in a period of profound social and economic change.

Sommer's theses are numerous and significant. He argues that the late empire witnessed the gradual establishment of a relatively uniform free-commoner standard of sexual morality that broadened the legal categories of illicit sex, thereby replacing the status-based regulations of the early empire. Additionally, he asserts that free-commoner standards of sexual practice were ones that confined sexual intercourse to marriage and fixed marital roles in ways that reinforced the dominance of males, but also underscored the importance of the chaste daughter, wife, and widow in the family system and society at large. Finally, the author argues that the intensification and expansion of sexual regulations in the Qing period were part of a broad range of initiatives aimed at establishing uniform legal norms to buttress family and society in a period of dramatic population increase and social and economic dislocation. These conditions, the author suggests, produced deep anxieties about family and community instability and the prospect of social and economic marginalization in eighteenth-century China. The metaphor for these anxieties became the transient "rogue" male, who was seen as encroaching on the free-commoner family by sexually violating and polluting chaste women and young boys.

The book begins with an excellent introduction that raises and defines key issues developed throughout the work, such as the change from status- to gender-based performance in sexual regulation. Sommer provides a careful evaluation of different categories of legal source materials used in the study: imperial codes, legal commentaries, and actual court cases, including central, provincial, and local county materials, drawn mainly from cases originating in Ba County (Sichuan), Shuntian (Zhili), and Danshui/Xinzhu (Taiwan), where the archival record is rich. These sources include important routine memorials reporting on capital crimes committed in the provinces and those committed in the capital that were related to security issues. The author argues that these materials, especially local court cases, provide valuable social and ethnographic data that shed light on social change and its impact on the lives of ordinary people.

Chapter 2, "A Vision of Sexual Order," carefully sets the stage for dramatic changes in sexual regulation in the late empire by tracing the evolution of pivotal concepts related to illicit sexual intercourse and relating them to changing norms regarding marriage and the family. The author highlights the term for illicit sex (jian), which was defined as phallic penetration "out of place," or outside the normative moral and ritual bonds of marriage. He asserts that the Chinese have consistently interpreted illicit sex in this sense, as violating fundamental Confucian norms associated with filiality, ancestor worship, and the maintenance of the male descent order, and, therefore, it has always been perceived as a dangerous threat to China's family-centered social order and paternalistic political order. What changed over the centuries, he explains, was not the basic definition of jian, but what was included in its compass. In the early empire, status-based prerogatives, such as the master's power over servile...