Homosexuality in Early China: History and Historiography of a Minor Tradition

Paper Preamble:

In this essay, I will introduce my current book manuscript project, tentatively titled “Homosexuality in Early China: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents.” It is a bilingual, i.e., Literary Sinitic and modern English, critical anthology of documents related to same-sex relations from early China from roughly 1,000 BCE to 200 CE.1 Specifically, I will detail how this book project was first conceived, how it has developed, and what scholarly contributions I hope it will make after it is published and reaches the hands of readers. This sourcebook, once successfully completed, will be the first of its kind in the field of early China studies. The discussion of its conception and compilation, therefore, also doubles as a consideration – and my own reflection – on the state of the field of the history of homosexuality and gender relations in early China at large. Much more work remains to be done, as I will argue, for a proper and necessary queering of the field of early China.

Presentation Abstracts:
Our knowledge of homosexual traditions in the ancient world has grown by leaps and bounds in the past few decades. The landmark publication of Greek Homosexuality by John Dover in 1978 inaugurated a whole new field on the history of same-sex relations in the classical Mediterranean world. A great many publications on this oncetaboo subject have appeared since then, and by now, we have a fairly rich, panoramic view of the varied lives of homosexuals in Ancient Greece and Rome. In contrast, the scholarly landscape at the opposite end of Eurasia, namely Ancient China, is far less developed. Groundbreaking works did appear a few decades ago, such as Bret Hirsch’s Passions of Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (1990) and Zhang Zaizhou’s Aiwei de licheng: Zhongguo gudai tongxinglian shi (Ambiguous Journeys: A History of Homosexuality in China; 2001). Significantly fewer new studies, however, have appeared in their wake. In this paper, I will present my ongoing book project Homosexuality in Early China: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents, which I hope to be a meaningful contribution to the field. It will be a critical anthology of all writings about homosexuality and homosexual individuals in Ancient China from antiquity to the second century CE. I will introduce the design of this anthology, the very first of its kind, the range of sources that we have, and the furtive glimpses that they afford us into the often-perilous lives of homosexuals in Ancient China.