By Matthew H. Sommer
This learn of the legislation of sexuality within the Qing dynasty explores the social context for sexual habit criminalized by means of the country, arguing that the eighteenth century in China used to be a time of profound swap in sexual issues. in this time, the elemental organizing precept for kingdom law of sexuality shifted clear of prestige, less than which contributors of alternative teams had lengthy been held to specified criteria of familial and sexual morality. instead, a brand new regime of gender mandated a uniform average of sexual morality and legal legal responsibility throughout prestige boundaries—all humans have been anticipated to comply to gender roles outlined when it comes to marriage.
This shift within the rules of sexuality, manifested in authentic remedy of fees of adultery, rape, sodomy, widow chastity, and prostitution, represented the imperial state’s efforts to deal with nerve-racking social and demographic alterations. Anachronistic prestige different types have been discarded to house a extra fluid social constitution, and the nation initiated new efforts to implement inflexible gender roles and therefore to shore up the peasant kin opposed to a swelling underclass of unmarried, rogue men open air the relatives approach. those males have been demonized as sexual predators who threatened the chaste other halves and daughters (and the younger sons) of decent families, and a flood of recent laws precise them for suppression.
In addition to proposing reliable and judicial activities relating to sexuality, the publication tells the tale of individuals excluded from authorised styles of marriage and loved ones who bonded with one another in unorthodox methods (combining sexual union with source pooling and fictive kinship) to meet quite a number human wishes. This formerly invisible measurement of Qing social perform is introduced into sharp concentration by way of the testimony, gleaned from neighborhood and critical court docket records, of such marginalized humans as peasants, workers, and beggars.
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Extra info for Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China
Sample text
CHAPTER TWO A Vision of Sexual Order Definitions and Boundaries This chapter sketches a preliminary definition of jian, the basic term used for sex offenses in legal codes of the late imperial era. English has no exact equivalent of this word, which one finds used as a noun, a transitive verb, and a modifier. The closest approximations of the noun-"sexual intercourse out of place" or "illicit sexual intercourse"-are both awl{ward and imprecise. But also, the sexual dimension captures only part of the term's wider range of meaning, just as anxiety about intercourse out of place was only a subset of a more general fear of moral and political disorder.
The vast majority of litigation in county courts involved relatively minor offenses and concluded at the county level, without being sent up through the bureaucracy for review. In the records of such cases, magistrates usually did not bother explaining their decisions in terms of specific laws and meted out (or withheld) penalties on a case-by-case basis without direct reference to the code. This does not mean that local adjudication was arbitrary or unconnected with the principles embodied in codified law (see P.
For example, the early dictionary Xiao erya (which probably dates from the Han dynasty) states: "If a male and a female engage in intercourse without ritual, it is called 'yin' (nan nil bu yi li jiao, wei zhi yin)" (guang yi 4/4a). Some early texts (including Qin and Han statutes) use jian to mean offenses of a specifically sexual nature, but this term often carried a broader meaning of depravity, villainy, or criminality. Legal codes from the Tang dynasty on use jian in a more exclusive and exact way, to mean illicit sexual intercourse or political treachery.