After Eunuchs

After Eunuchs deftly explores how the introduction of Western biomedicine transformed understandings of gender, sexuality, and the body in Chinese contexts from the twentieth century onward. Using an impressive range of sources, Chiang rescues the history of castration—perhaps one of the most notorious culturally overdetermined corporeal subjects—from the legacy of prevailing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives that characterize the practice almost exclusively as backward, traditional, and oppressive. Along the way, Chiang illuminates a host of other practices and corporeal formations by challenging the many essentialisms that still inform our assumptions about the wholeness of the human body. A rich and original work. -- Ari Heinrich, University of California, San Diego
An important study that is both long overdue and remarkably timely. Chiang draws a controversial line between imperial China’s eunuchs and modern Taiwan’s first transsexual surgery. Tracing this path takes us through twentieth-century regimes of visuality, the impact of biological and psychiatric reasoning, and the production of sexual pathologies. With its focus on “transformations of sex,” After Eunuchs will undoubtedly renew debate about the nature of Chinese modernity. -- Ruth Rogaski, Vanderbilt University
Howard Chiang’s After Eunuchs is a persuasive history of how, between 1870 and 1930, bio-scientization of sex was normalized in China. This strongly evidenced, briskly written, imaginative work takes a bold step into describing conditions for thinking about sexual and therefore gender difference. It appeals across the disciplines and enters into general debates about the science and history of sex difference, sexual desire, sex morphology, and queer theory. -- Tani Barlow, Rice University
Chiang’s After Eunuchs presents a fascinating genealogical dissection of the epistemology of gender mutability, intersexuality, and transsexuality in modern Chinese history. * LSE Review of Books *
After Eunuchs is both a fascinating tour of the construction and deconstruction of sexuality in the Chinese‐speaking (Sinophone) world and a significant theoretical contribution to historical understandings of the creation of global medical and scientific modernity. * The Historian *
After Eunuchs is an imaginative and erudite account of sex, science and Chinese modernity...a must read
for scholars interested in the East Asia and Sinophone studies, the history of science and medicine, as well as sexuality and queer studies. * Social History of Medicine *
An important contribution to the history of global sexuality in multiple ways. * Gender and History *
[After Eunuchs] is very much a worthwhile read, and moreover, meticulously researched. * Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences *
A monumental study that rethinks China’s modernity through the historical intersection of science and sexuality. . . . Chiang demonstrates the crucial roles of nonwestern societies in the history of sexuality, queer studies, as well as producing and transmitting scientific knowledge. * Canadian Journal of History *
The book’s organized structure, historical contextualization, and lucid prose make it accessible to a broad audience both within and outside the China field...a must-read for scholars of modern Chinese history and culture, as well as for anyone invested in understanding the global history of science, medicine, and sex -- Elise Huerta, Stanford University * Modern Chinese Literature and Culture *
Wide ranging and ambitious in its themes and scholarly engagements. * Twentieth Century China *
A fascinating, persuasive analysis...this book makes a rich and imaginative contribution to discussions about
the psychobiological understandings of sex and sexuality that emerged in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. -- Séagh Kehoe, Contemporary China Centre, University of Westminster * GLQ *
Careful exegeses of a vast array of sources and scholarship is masterfully intertwined with heart-wrenching (and often cringeworthy) stories of individuals’ physical and emotional pain…. No matter the similarities to sexes, genders, and sexualities elsewhere, in China too, sex (and ethnicity) are products of specific local, regional, and global histories. Within those histories, After Eunuchs constitutes an important milestone far beyond its subject matter—especially in how it navigates the fault lines of language, history, and theory. -- Sabine Frühstück * Journal of Women’s History *