Sexual Diversity in Asia, C. 600 - 1950

ISBN-13: 9781138110229 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 176 str.

Raquel A. G. Reyes;William Gervase Clarence-Smith

Opis

Non-reproductive sex practices in Asia have historically been a source of fascination, prurient or otherwise, for Westerners, who being either Catholic or Protestant, were often struck by what they perceived as the widespread promiscuity and licentiousness of native inhabitants. Graphic descriptions, and pious denunciations, of sodomy, bestiality, transvestitism, and incest, abound in Western travel narratives, missionary accounts, and ethnographies. But what constituted indigenous sexual morality, and how was this influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity over time and place? What sex practices were tolerated or even encouraged by society, community, and religious ritual, and what acts were considered undesirable, transgressive and worthy of punishment? Sexual Diversity in Asia, c. 600-1950 is the first book to foreground same- sex acts and pleasure seeking in the histories of India, China, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia. Drawing on a range of indigenous and foreign sources, the contributors, all renowned experts in their fields, shed light on indigenous notions of gender and the body, social hierarchies, fundamental ideas concerning morality and immorality, and episodes of seduction. The book illuminates - in striking case studies - attitudes toward non-procreative sex acts, and representations and experiences of same-sex pleasure seeking in the histories of Asia.ã This path-breaking book is an important contribution to the study of gender and sexuality in Asian cultures and will also interest students and scholars of world history.ã

Spis treści

Introduction  Part 1: Texts  1. Other Pleasures? Anal Sex and Medical Discourse in Pre-Modern China  2. Censured Sexual Acts and Early Medieval Society in India  3. Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Identities in Islamic Southeast Asia, from the Fifteenth Century to the 1940s  Part 2: People  4. Strange Bedfellows: Male Homo-Eroticism and Politics in Thai History  5. The Shogun’s Lover’s Would-be Swedish Boyfriend: Inoue Masashige, Tokugawa Iemitsu and Olof Eriksson Willman  Part 3: Crimes and Sins  6. Sodomy in Seventeenth-Century Manila: The Luck of a Mandarin from Taiwan  7. Male-Male Sex, Bestiality and Incest in the Early-Modern Indonesian Archipelago: Perceptions and Penalties