Matthew Sommer (History, Stanford University)

This talk presents three case studies from the Qing dynasty of people assigned male at birth who lived as women, while carefully concealing their assigned sex from others. One presented themself as a widow and had a successful career as a midwife for thirty years. Two others practiced faith-healing, and enjoyed relationships with male partners whom they served as wives. All three were eventually exposed and prosecuted for the crime of “masquerading in women’s attire.” What were the circumstances of these individuals’ lives, and how did Qing officials interpret their violation of normative gender boundaries?

Sommer is a social and legal historian of China in the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). His research focuses on gender, sexuality, and family, and the main source for his work is original legal case records from local and central archives in China.

Engendering China is the theme of the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative spring '23 lecture series hosted by faculty member, Yue (Mara) Du (History, Cornell), and the series corresponds to the course of the same name that she is teaching (Engendering China: CAPS2932, ASIAN 2291, FGSS 2932, HIST 2932).

In contemporary China, as in many other places of the world, the ideology and social reality of gender relations are highly paradoxical. Women are flattered for their power as consumers and commitment to the family while they are also expected to engage in wage-earning employment. Men, on the other hand, face the constant pressure of being tough and social problems such as skewed gender ratio and costly betrothal gifts as unintended consequences of a gender regime that is supposedly male-oriented. Are these paradoxes a betrayal of the socialist experiment of erasing gender differences? Are they remnants of China’s long imperial tradition? The series and course explore the power dynamics of gender relations in China from ancient times to the present.

Along with the East Asia Program, this lecture series is co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Department of History, ILR School's Global Labor Institute, The Levinson China and Asia Pacific Studies Program, and Cornell's Society for the Humanities.