Coming to terms with Chastity: Strategic Uses of Religion for Women Sexuality in Medieval China

Female sexuality figures prominently in the state ideology of traditional China that championed chaste women, including widows who maintained sexual abstinence and engaged maidens who pursued a lifetime of sexual purity for their deceased fiancés. The state would grant chaste women official recognition that comes with a series of practical benefits, such as tax exemption for their households. In medieval China, the recognition of chaste women often hinged on supernatural happenings according to the Confucian correlative cosmology that Heaven would respond to virtuous deeds with miracles. Much has been written about the patriarchal and oppressive qualities of the state ideology undergirded by Confucianism. The subjugated status of women in traditional China is well recognized. However, other than as victims, little is known about how women might have lived their lives as active agents despite the exploitation of them. To appreciate women’s agency within an oppressive society like medieval China, I believe it is necessary to take stock of both our own feminist assumptions and the androcentric biases of the sources we use to recover women’s voices.

As to our own feminist assumptions, we must be wary of projecting the idealization of modern women into medieval China lest we, for all our good intentions of liberating women, “colonize” women in medieval China by classifying them indiscriminately into the category of the oppressed (Mohanty 1997). It must be acknowledged that women in medieval China, or in premodern societies for that matter, exercised agency in ways different from the idealized modern women who – empowered with autonomy over their own bodies, sexuality, and decisions – intentionally challenge patriarchal norms. To recuperate women’s agency is, then, not simply to search for rebellious heroines adopting a confrontational posture against the dominant ideology. Rather, it is to direct our gaze toward women’s lived experiences to see how women, seemingly subservient, operated within the given oppression to construct their lives by negotiating with and even manipulating the dominant ideology (Griffith 1997; Mahmood 2005). Therefore, this paper takes it as a given that the majority of women in medieval China submitted to the discourses about chastity before exploring how women might have expressed their sexual agency. 

We must also interrogate the androcentric biases of the sources we use to recover women’s voices. First, it is important to distinguish between history (the past) and our sources (records of the past) so that our rewriting of women’s history can avoid replicating the stereotypical representations of women in the sources constructed mostly by historical men. This paper maintains a heightened awareness that historical men pursued the valuation of women chastity in the matrix of patriarchy and power. Second, given the androcentric-biased sources are probably all that we have for the past, we cannot give up them altogether. Rather, we should strive to read “between the lines” and dare to interpret them in imaginative, critical ways to make women’s voices emerge (Fiorenza 1992). 

The paper reads imagination into two types of texts to yield a vivid glimpse of how women in medieval China might have used religion to sidestep the punishment associated with the discourses on chastity. The first type of texts is a hypothetical litigation text written for officials as a model for judging real legal cases. The text includes a hypothetical scenario followed by an official judgment. The scenario is that a widow got pregnant and requested to be recognized as a chaste woman by claiming that her pregnancy was Heaven’s reward for her virtues. Meanwhile, the widow’s brother wanted to remarry her for the gain of dowry. In contrast with the plethora of chaste women stories, this scenario shows a widow using religion to act on her own behalf. Insofar as there must be a natural reason for her pregnancy, we note first that the widow knew too well that the ideology of Heaven rewarding virtues with miracles was a religious fraud. We note then that the widow, instead of challenging or debunking the ideology, went along with it and employed it to her own advantage: an official recognition of her as a chaste woman would not only spare her suspicions about her pregnancy but also override her brother’s attempt to remarry her. Considering that the text was meant to be a model for judging real cases, the hypothetical nature of the scenario, I shall argue, should not be taken as that the story was far removed from reality.  

The second type of texts is a body of similar tales involving the plot of women seduced by evil deities masquerading as someone else. These women include unmarried women and women whose husbands were away from home. These tales are usually framed in terms of interreligious competitions, whereby religious opponents are associated with the evil deities. As a result, they can be too quickly read from an institutional perspective. We can construct a feminist reinterpretation of them by using the “principle of irrelevance” that irrelevant details in a text represent shared knowledge of the society depicted in the text (Nattier 2005). Along these lines, we can note that the seduction of women may point to the reality that women did exercise their sexual agency in medieval China despite the discourses of chastity. They, or perhaps their brothers and husbands, framed their sexual activities as supernatural seductions to avoid being censured by the discourses of chastity. This paper will provide two representative examples of these tales.

While acknowledging the historical limitations of women’s sexual agency, this paper goes beyond the duality of chastity and licentiousness to explore the degree of subjectivity exercised by women in medieval China. For them, the opposite of chastity is not licentiousness but different strategies of expressing sexual agency within or around the ideology of chastity.