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1 The Language of Male Same-Sex Relations in China Ahuge vocabulary describing male same-sex relations, and men engaged in such relations, suggests that the issue was not a silent one in China during the rst half of the twentieth century. These terms included: duanxiupi (ᒾ୿ᓜ, the obsession with the cut sleeve), fentaozhihao (ʗ࣠ɾΡ, the love of sharing a peach), Longyangjun (᎘ඈз, the name of a male favorite in history), nanchong (Әᕠ, male favorite), nanse (Әϳ, male beauty), nanfeng (‫ࠓڲ‬, southern mode, or Әࠓ, male mode), xianggong (‫ޚ‬ʔ, young gentlemen or Peking opera actors who play female roles working as male prostitutes), tuzi (Ԫɥ, rabbit), pijing (Ѭ ၀, ass expert, or fairy), renyao (Ɂѝ, freak, fairy, or human prodigy), jijian (ᔸ ۣ, buggery or sodomy), zouhanlu (to take the land route, ӶҠ༏), houtinghua (‫࢓܃‬٦, owers of the rear garden), jiangnan zuonü (ੀӘАɤ, to use a man as a woman), and tongxing lian’ai (΃ֲᛞෲ, same-sex love or homosexuality). All of these terms appeared in tabloid newspapers, social commentaries, sexological writings, or literary works. Some of them were derived from historical stories or Western sexological terminology, and others were local slang and gurative language. This chapter will rst trace the historical origins of the expressions for male same-sex relations prevalent in China during the rst half of the twentieth century and then explore the relationship between the meanings of the Chinese terms and the Western sexological concept of homosexuality. By doing so, it seeks to go beyond the question of whether male same-sex relations were socially accepted or not, since rarely does a society have a uniform understanding of sexual behaviors. Instead, I argue that Chinese thoughts on male same-sex relations circulating in the early twentieth century provided fertile ground for the dissemination of the Western sexological idea of homosexuality because the two shared comparable conceptual contradictions. While recognizing that negative meanings could potentially be derived from indigenous understandings of male same-sex relations, I am more interested Obsession 20 in the relationship between the meaning of sex and the political and the social context of the time. The semi-colonial era of the rst half of the twentieth century saw Western and Japanese powers establish their spheres of inuence, creating a situation in which the national government remained weak and Chinese people were treated as second-class citizens. In this threatening wider context of national crisis, these expressions provided a repertoire from which negative meanings of male same-sex relations could be drawn. I contend that in the rst half of the twentieth century, interpretations of male same-sex relations both reected and were determined by the national crisis of China’s semi-colonial status. In classical Chinese writings, male favorites could be blamed for dynastic calamities. Similarly, men named renyao, perceived as giving up the male gender role and adopting the female one, were considered as a bad omen for the dynasty.93 In the epistemological contact between early twentieth-century Chinese thought and Western sexological knowledge, this connotation of renyao, along with the negative understanding of male favorites and the idea of pathological obsession (pi), were fused with the Western pathological denition of homosexuality; and these thoughts were employed to explain the sickness of the nation and condemn men who had sex with other men for the political chaos and national misfortune of the time. Classical Chinese records served as a major source of these expressions. In pre-modern China, male same-sex relations were not as “widely accepted and even respected”94 or generally tolerated as Bret Hinsch claims in Passions of the Cut Sleeve. Instead, one of the major conceptualizations of male same-sex relations was modeled on the relationship between emperors and their male favorites, in which male favorites occupied both a subordinate and a feminized position, similar to that of female favorites. Thus, the relationship was understood as hierarchical in gendered terms. If Sima Qian’s (̇৛ሰ, 145?–90? B.C.E.) Records of the Historian only pointed out the equivalence between male and female favorites, Ban Gu’s (ऒ՞, 32–92 C.E.) History of Former Han began to stigmatize male same-sex relations based on the belief that male favorites interfere in politics and cause problems for the state. This gendered understanding of male same-sex relations and the belief that male favorites were politically dangerous persisted into the rst half of the twentieth century. Chinese thought also conceptualized male same-sex desire as pi (ᓜ, obsession), and men who adopted a female persona and had sex with other men as renyao (Ɂѝ, freak, fairy or...

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