Inside The World Of The Eunuch
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| Author | : Melissa S. Dale |
| Publisher | : Hong Kong University Press |
| Total Pages | : 236 |
| Release | : 2018-11-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9888455753 |
The history of Qing palace eunuchs is defined by a tension between the role eunuchs were meant to play and the life they intended to live. This study tells the story of how a complicated and much-maligned group of people struggled to insert a degree of agency into their lives. Rulers of the Qing dynasty were determined to ensure the eunuchs’ subservience and to limit their influence by imposing a management style based upon strict rules, corporal punishment, and collective responsibility. Few eunuchs wielded significant political power or lived in a lavish style during the Qing dynasty. Emasculation and employment in the palace placed eunuchs at the center of the empire, yet also subjected them to servile status and marginalization by society. Seeking more control over their lives, eunuchs serving the Qing repeatedly tested the boundaries of subservience to the emperor and the imperial court. This portrait of eunuch society reveals that Qing palace eunuchs operated within two parallel realms, one revolving around the emperor and the court by day and another among the eunuchs themselves by night where they recreated the social bonds—through drinking, gambling, and opium smoking—denied them by their palace service. Far from being the ideal servants, eunuchs proved to be a constant source of anxiety and labor challenges for the Qing court. For a long time eunuchs have simply been cast as villains in Chinese history. Inside the World of the Eunuch goes beyond this misleadingly one-dimensional depiction to show how eunuchs actually lived during the Qing dynasty. “This book is a thorough and responsible account of eunuch life during the Qing dynasty, which takes us deep inside the Forbidden City and introduces the often underclass families who provided servants to the Qing monarchs.” —R. Kent Guy, University of Washington “This is a unique study of Chinese eunuchs, in which Melissa Dale proves that they were a necessary and vital presence in the palace of the last dynasty in China. She explores all aspects of their life to the end of their existence, while avoiding the temptation to sensationalize them.” —Keith McMahon, University of Kansas
| Author | : Howard Chiang |
| Publisher | : Columbia University Press |
| Total Pages | : 291 |
| Release | : 2018-08-07 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0231546335 |
For much of Chinese history, the eunuch stood out as an exceptional figure at the margins of gender categories. Amid the disintegration of the Qing Empire, men and women in China began to understand their differences in the language of modern science. In After Eunuchs, Howard Chiang traces the genealogy of sexual knowledge from the demise of eunuchism to the emergence of transsexuality, showing the centrality of new epistemic structures to the formation of Chinese modernity. From anticastration discourses in the late Qing era to sex-reassignment surgeries in Taiwan in the 1950s and queer movements in the 1980s and 1990s, After Eunuchs explores the ways the introduction of Western biomedical sciences transformed normative meanings of gender, sexuality, and the body in China. Chiang investigates how competing definitions of sex circulated in science, medicine, vernacular culture, and the periodical press, bringing to light a rich and vibrant discourse of sex change in the first half of the twentieth century. He focuses on the stories of gender and sexual minorities as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, philosophers, educators, reformers, journalists, and tabloid writers, as they debated the questions of political sovereignty, national belonging, cultural authenticity, scientific modernity, human difference, and the power and authority of truths about sex. Theoretically sophisticated and far-reaching, After Eunuchs is an innovative contribution to the history and philosophy of science and queer and Sinophone studies.
| Author | : Norman A. Kutcher |
| Publisher | : Univ of California Press |
| Total Pages | : 345 |
| Release | : 2018-07-31 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0520969847 |
Eunuch and Emperor in the Great Age of Qing Rule offers a new interpretation of eunuchs and their connection to imperial rule in the first century and a half of the Qing dynasty (1644–1800). This period encompassed the reigns of three of China’s most important emperors, men who were deeply affected by the great eunuch corruption of the fallen Ming dynasty. In this groundbreaking and deeply researched book, the author explores how Qing emperors sought to prevent a return of the harmful excesses of eunuchs and how eunuchs flourished in the face of the restrictions imposed upon them. We meet powerful eunuchs who faithfully served, and in some cases ultimately betrayed, their emperors. We also meet ordinary eunuchs whose lives, punctuated by dramas large and small, provide a fascinating perspective on the Qing palace world.
| Author | : Kathryn M. Ringrose |
| Publisher | : University of Chicago Press |
| Total Pages | : 309 |
| Release | : 2007-11-01 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 0226720160 |
The Perfect Servant reevaluates the place of eunuchs in Byzantium. Kathryn Ringrose uses the modern concept of gender as a social construct to identify eunuchs as a distinct gender and to illustrate how gender was defined in the Byzantine world. At the same time she explores the changing role of the eunuch in Byzantium from 600 to 1100. Accepted for generations as a legitimate and functional part of Byzantine civilization, eunuchs were prominent in both the imperial court and the church. They were distinctive in physical appearance, dress, and manner and were considered uniquely suited for important roles in Byzantine life. Transcending conventional notions of male and female, eunuchs lived outside of normal patterns of procreation and inheritance and were assigned a unique capacity for mediating across social and spiritual boundaries. This allowed them to perform tasks from which prominent men and women were constrained, making them, in essence, perfect servants. Written with precision and meticulously researched, The Perfect Servant will immediately take its place as a major study on Byzantium and the history of gender.
| Author | : Jane Hathaway |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 341 |
| Release | : 2018-08-30 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1107108292 |
A study of the chief of the African eunuchs who guarded the sultan's harem in Istanbul under the Ottoman Empire.
| Author | : Germaine Greer |
| Publisher | : Harper Collins |
| Total Pages | : 541 |
| Release | : 2009-02-06 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 0061972800 |
The publication of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch in 1970 was a landmark event, raising eyebrows and ire while creating a shock wave of recognition in women around the world with its steadfast assertion that sexual liberation is the key to women's liberation. Today, Greer's searing examination of the oppression of women in contemporary society is both an important historical record of where we've been and a shockingly relevant treatise on what still remains to be achieved.
| Author | : Megan K. DeFranza |
| Publisher | : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing |
| Total Pages | : 327 |
| Release | : 2015-05-08 |
| Genre | : Religion |
| ISBN | : 0802869823 |
Charts a faithful theological middle course through complex sexual issues How different are men and women? When does it matter to us -- or to God? Are male and female the only two options? In Sex Difference in Christian Theology Megan DeFranza explores such questions in light of the Bible, theology, and science. Many Christians, entrenched in culture wars over sexual ethics, are either ignorant of the existence of intersex persons or avoid the inherent challenge they bring to the assumption that everybody is born after the pattern of either Adam or Eve. DeFranza argues, from a conservative theological standpoint, that all people are made in the image of God -- male, female, and intersex -- and that we must listen to and learn from the voices of the intersexed among us.
| Author | : Jonathan Kos-Read |
| Publisher | : Earnshaw Books Limited |
| Total Pages | : 346 |
| Release | : 2022-01-31 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9789888769216 |
The Emperor has brutally murdered one of his concubines, something which, everyone admits, he has every right to do.... Or did he? In the bitterly cold north China winter of 1153, the Eunuch Gett senses there is more to the murder, but when he is ordered by the Emperor to investigate it, he is trapped. With all clues pointing towards the Emperor himself, Gett knows that any misstep will mean his own death by execution. As he makes his way through the maze of harem sexual politics, ferocious court wars and the seething city beyond the palace walls, he must answer one question: Why frame a man who is above punishment? This gripping novel by Jonathan Kos-Read, China's top foreign actor with over a hundred films to his credit, delves deep into the imperial past, and into sexual customs that remain alive even today. Customs that can kill a woman. Or bring down an Empire....
| Author | : Almut Höfert |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 269 |
| Release | : 2017-08-15 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 1317182375 |
This book explores a striking common feature of pre-modern ruling systems on a global scale: the participation of childless and celibate men as integral parts of the elites. In bringing court eunuchs and bishops together, this collection shows that the integration of men who were normatively or physically excluded from biological fatherhood offered pre-modern dynasties the potential to use different reproduction patterns. The shared focus on ruling eunuchs and bishops also reveals that these men had a specific position at the intersection of four fields: power, social dynamics, sacredness and gender/masculinities. The thirteen chapters present case studies on clerics in Medieval Europe and court eunuchs in the Middle East, Byzantium, India and China. They analyze how these men in their different frameworks acted as politicians, participated in social networks, provided religious authority, and discuss their masculinities. Taken together, this collection sheds light on the political arena before the modern nation-state excluded these unmarried men from the circles of political power.
| Author | : Shih-shan Henry Tsai |
| Publisher | : SUNY Press |
| Total Pages | : 306 |
| Release | : 1996-01-01 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 9780791426876 |
This book is the first on Chinese eunuchs in English and presents a comprehensive picture of the role that they played in the Ming dynasty, 1368-1644. Extracted from a wide range of primary and secondary source material, the author provides significant and interesting information about court politics, espionage and internal security, military and foreign affairs, tax and tribute collection, the operation of imperial monopolies, judiciary review, the layout of the palace complex, the Grand Canal, and much more. The eunuchs are shown to be not just a minor adjunct to a government of civil servants and military officers, but a fully developed third branch of the Ming administration that participated in all of the most essential matters of the dynasty. The veil of condemnation and jealousy imposed on eunuchs by the compilers of official history is pulled away to reveal a richly textured tapestry. Eunuchs are portrayed in a balanced manner that gives due consideration to able and faithful service along with the inept, the lurid, and the iniquitous.
