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Polygamy and Sublime Passion - Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (Hardcover)
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Polygamy and Sublime Passion - Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (Hardcover)
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For centuries of Chinese history, polygamy and prostitution were
closely linked practices that legitimized the 'polygynous male',
the man with multiple sexual partners. Despite their strict
hierarchies, these practices also addressed fundamental antagonisms
in sexual relations in serious and constructive ways. Qing fiction
abounds in stories of female resistance and superiority. Women -
main wives, concubines, and prostitutes - were adept at exerting
control and gaining status for themselves, while men indulged in
elaborate fantasies about female power. Keith McMahon introduces a
new concept, 'passive polygamy', to explain the unusual number of
Qing stories in which women take charge of a man's desires, turning
him into an instrument of female will. To this he adds a story that
haunted the institutions of polygamy and prostitution: the tale of
'sublime passion', in which the main characters are a 'remarkable'
woman and her male lover. Throughout McMahon examines how polygamy,
prostitution, and the story of sublime passion encountered the
first stages of paradigmatic change in the nineteenth century,
decades before the legal abolition of polygamy. By the end of the
Qing dynasty in 1911, love stories were celebrating the exploits of
street-smart prostitutes who fleeced gullible patrons in the
bustling city of Shanghai. What do these characters have in common
with their early counterparts as men and women became inhabitants
of a new city in an era flooded with ideas from radically foreign
sources - all of this taking place in a time of economic and
cultural dislocation? McMahon reads late Qing love stories in a
historically symbolic way, taking them as part of a larger fantasy
of Chinese civilization undergoing a fundamental crisis. The
polygamous marriage and the affairs of the brothel became
metaphorical staging grounds for portraying the destiny of China on
the verge of modernity. Finally, McMahon speculates on the changes
polygamous sexuality underwent after the Qing dynasty ended and
whether it exerted a residual influence in later times.
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