This article examines popular anecdotes about erotic responses to religious images during the Song dynasty . It first compares three interrelated traditions in order to see different agents at work: discussions of living images in art criticism, stories about miraculous icons in religious accounts, and erotic encounters with nonhumans in tales and anecdotes. In comparison with these traditions, narratives of erotic interaction with religious images often emphasize the agency of the viewer. For cases in which images are said to have responded, the narrative often displays deliberate efforts toward justification and interpretation. This article then examines the materiality of religious imagery in Song anecdotes and compares it with the nonreligious images and objects that become jingguai 精怪 (transforming creatures). Finally, through analyzing the depiction of female beholders and their desire in anecdotes and medical treatises, this article argues that a changing discourse on female sexuality took place during the Song-Yuan period.

No abstract

This article examines Chinese medical discussions about “manless women” (women without sexual contact with men) from the ancient period to the Song dynasty and whether, and how, such women were considered a medical problem. Through destabilizing the (hetero)sex–desire–procreation continuum seen in a number of historical sources and modern scholarship, I present a more complex picture of the medical developments in question during the Song. I observe that there was little medical discussion of female sexual desire in pre-Song sources except in “bedchamber” texts, which, in treating the ailments of manless women, gazed into women’s sexual desire and paid little attention to women’s generative or gestational body. Several Song medical writers, while consciously excluding bedchamber texts from what they considered orthodox medicine, shared with the bedchamber authors the medical gaze at female sexual desire. I further argue that Xu Shuwei and Chen Ziming were the first and only two Song medical writers to make explicit a (hetero)sex–desire–procreation link and to naturalize women’s sexual desire for men. Though anomalous in their time, their discussions tell us something about the heterogeneity of medical texts and the status of medical knowledge in Song society—two aspects often neglected in analyses of gender discourse in traditional Chinese medicine.

No abstract

No abstract