Manless Women and the Sex–Desire–Procreation Link in Song Medicine

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.