Mencius and Masculinities

Mencius and Masculinities
Author: Joanne D. Birdwhistell
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0791480380

In this innovative work, Joanne D. Birdwhistell presents the first gender analysis of the Mencius, a central text in the Chinese philosophical tradition. Mencian philosophy, particularly its ideas about the processes by which a man could develop into a cultivated gentleman, was important to the political thought of China's long imperial order. Through close textual readings, Birdwhistell offers a new interpretation of core Mencian ideas about the heart and the self-cultivation of the great man. She argues that the concept of masculinity advocated by the Mencius is derived, although without acknowledgment, from maternal practices and thinking—through processes of appropriation, inversion, and transformation. She illustrates that even though maternal practices and thinking are an invisible dimension of Mencian thought, they are constantly present in the text through their transcoding with agricultural practices and thinking.

Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China

Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China
Author: Martin W. Huang
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2006-01-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0824863739

Why did traditional Chinese literati so often identify themselves with women in their writing? What can this tell us about how they viewed themselves as men and how they understood masculinity? How did their attitudes in turn shape the martial heroes and other masculine models they constructed? Martin Huang attempts to answer these questions in this valuable work on manhood in late imperial China. He focuses on the ambivalent and often paradoxical role played by women and the feminine in the intricate negotiating process of male gender identity in late imperial cultural discourses. Two common strategies for constructing and negotiating masculinity were adopted in many of the works examined here.The first, what Huang calls the strategy of analogy, constructs masculinity in close association with the feminine; the second, the strategy of differentiation, defines it in sharp contrast to the feminine. In both cases women bear the burden as the defining "other." In this study,"feminine" is a rather broad concept denoting a wide range of gender phenomena associated with women, from the politically and socially destabilizing to the exemplary wives and daughters celebrated in Confucian chastity discourse.

Ethics Unbound

Ethics Unbound
Author: Katrin Froese
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2013-05-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9629964961

This book closely examines texts from Chinese and Western traditions that hold up ethics as the inviolable ground of human existence, as well as those that regard ethics with suspicion. The negative notion of morality contends that because ethics cannot be divorced from questions of belonging and identity, there is a danger that it can be nudged into the domain of the unethical, since ethical virtues can become properties to be possessed with which the recognition of others is solicited. Ethics thus fosters the very egoism it hopes to transcend, and risks excluding the unfamiliar and the stranger. The author argues inspirationally that the unethical underbelly of ethics must be recognized in order to ensure that it remains vibrant.

A Borkland Variety

A Borkland Variety
Author: Herbert Borkland
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2019-09-17
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0359924522

Please visit www.lulu.com/spotlight/herbork for the eBook versions. A Borkland Variety collects shorter prose works by controversial novelist and international award-winning screenwriter Herbert Borkland. Included are a trio of vivid short stories, two fast-paced comic stage plays, a wide-ranging selection of colorful essays, and the complete Pride Goes South, a taut, powerful short novel of Washington, DC do-gooders caught up in South American revolution. "At a time when our Western tradition of free, ambitious literature is under attack, Borkland fights back."

Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood

Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood
Author: H. Crocker
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2007-06-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230604927

This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture's mounting obsession with vision, constructing a model of 'manhed' that blurs the distinction between agency and passivity in a traditional gender binary.

Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture

Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture
Author: Carlos Rojas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2008-12-08
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1134032242

Through analyses of a wide range of Chinese literary and visual texts from the beginning of the twentieth century through the contemporary period, the thirteen essays in this volume challenge the view that canonical and popular culture are self-evident and diametrically opposed categories, and instead argue that the two cultural sensibilities are inextricably bound up with one another. An international line up of contributors present detailed analyses of literary works and other cultural products that have previously been neglected by scholars, while also examining more familiar authors and works from provocative new angles.The essays include investigations into the cultural industries and contexts that produce the canonical and popular, the position of contemporary popular works at the interstices of nostalgia and amnesia, and also the ways in which cultural texts are inflected with gendered and erotic sensibilities while at the same time also functioning as objects of desire in its own right. As the only volume of its kind to cover the entire span of the 20th century, and also to consider the interplay of popular and canonical literature in modern China with comparable rigor, Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture is an important resource for students and scholars of Chinese literature and culture.

The Libertine's Friend

The Libertine's Friend
Author: Giovanni Vitiello
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2011-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226857956

Delving into three hundred years of Chinese literature, from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, The Libertine’s Friend uncovers the complex and fascinating history of male homosexual and homosocial relations in the late imperial era. Drawing particularly on overlooked works of pornographic fiction, Giovanni Vitiello offers a frank exploration of the importance of same-sex love and eroticism to the evolution of masculinity in China. Vitiello’s story unfolds chronologically, beginning with the earliest sources on homoeroticism in pre-imperial China and concluding with a look at developments in the twentieth century. Along the way, he identifies a number of recurring characters—for example, the libertine scholar, the chivalric hero, and the lustful monk—and sheds light on a set of key issues, including the social and legal boundaries that regulated sex between men, the rise of male prostitution, and the aesthetics of male beauty. Drawing on this trove of material, Vitiello presents a historical outline of changing notions of male homosexuality in China, revealing the integral part that same-sex desire has played in its culture.