Trans Clerical Masculinities: Family and Buddhist Monks in Late Imperial China

My study investigates how lower-level clerics in Qing China maintained familial ties, thereby challenging the gender norms imposed by their religious tradition. More importantly, it highlights the tension between the idealized clerical conduct prescribed in monastic regulations and the lived experiences of clergy who remained deeply embedded in their families and communities.

This study primarily draws on criminal case records involving Buddhist monks—an underutilized source in religious scholarship that offers rich insights into the everyday lives of non-elite monks at the local level. Methodologically, I adopt Matthew Sommer’s perspective (2024), which conceptualizes Buddhist monasticism as a set of transgender practices. Building on Susan Stryker’s definition of “transgender” as encompassing individuals who move away from their assigned gender at birth and cross culturally constructed gender boundaries, Sommer argues that clergy, alongside eunuchs and actors, constituted a distinct transgender group in the late imperial era. However, their gender transgression was largely contained within narrowly defined institutional settings, rendering it socially and politically non-threatening to the normative order. This approach enables historians to engage with transgender as a more fluid and expansive category, moving beyond a rigid focus on identity.

The challenge, however, is that, as Sommer has noted, many clerics in the Qing did not conform to the normative clerical gender ideal, generating significant social and political anxieties. Scholars have long observed the prevalence of sexually promiscuous clergy in Ming-Qing literature. Some have interpreted these depictions as evidence of moral corruption among the clergy in the late imperial era (e.g., Yü, 1998), while others argue that the figure of the licentious monk was merely a culturally constructed trope, whose popularity does not necessarily reflect the overall moral character of the sangha (e.g., Karasawa, 2007; Wu, 2019).

This study shifts focus to a lesser-explored dimension of clerical transgender practice: monks’ continued interaction with their natal families after ordination. Given the central role of kinship in shaping lay masculinities in imperial China, these interactions carry significant implications. I will critically reassess the long-standing assumption that monasticism was antithetical to secular family life by examining the ongoing, multifaceted relationships between monks and their lay families. My research will explore how clerics sustained these ties, the contexts in which they did so, and local attitudes toward such connections. Through this case study, I argue that late imperial clerics navigated multiple, competing gender regimes that coexisted and intersected in everyday life.

This study will enrich our understanding of the historical complexity of Chinese masculinities and, more broadly speaking, gender relations by addressing noticeable limitations in current scholarship on the subject. Recently, a plethora of studies have emphatically pointed to the multifarious and oftentimes conflicting expressions of masculinity in Chinese culture (e.g., Brownell and Wasserstrom eds., 2002; Louie, 2002; Song, 2004; Huang, 2006; Hinsch, 2013; Louie ed., 2016). However, with a few exceptions (e.g., Sommer, 2000, 2015), most have adopted a structural approach to the study of masculinity. Often, these studies use descriptive and categorical signifiers in front of the term masculinity as a way of theorization, the most prominent example of which is the influential paradigm of wen and wu (usually translated as “literary” and “martial”) masculinities. What is overlooked or repressed in these essentialist categories is men’s fluid lived experiences and their agentive and reflexive engagement with masculine practices. Moreover, current scholarship tends to focus on educated elites to the exclusion of the vast majority of Chinese men who were either illiterate or had little exposure to classical education. The imbalanced perspective then runs the risk of distorting our understanding of Chinese masculinities by overemphasizing the influence of elite-constructed hegemonic masculine ideals (e.g., wen and wu) in the whole society and overlooking the agency of marginalized and subordinated men like ordinary monks in negotiating, resisting, and transforming these ideals. By foregrounding the experiences of how clerics constructed their masculinities and navigated their effects in everyday life, this study will illuminate the other side of Chinese masculinities that was far more complicated, contradictory, and tension-filled than previously described.

Meanwhile, this study also incorporates the often-neglected issue of masculinity into the study of gender and religion. Until now, the subject of clerical masculinity has received little academic attention. Even though scholars have begun to critically address the intersectionality of gender and religion (e.g., Grant, 2008; Jia, Yao, Kang eds., 2014; Kang, 2015; Valussi, 2019), most have concentrated on how religious women, often coming from elite backgrounds, understood, negotiated, and contested sexual and gender regimes of various religious traditions. Since gender is a relational construct, focusing only on the activities of religious women occludes the practices of religious men in the religious construction of gender identity. Therefore, our understanding of the interplay between religion and gender will remain incomplete without factoring masculinity in. 

Fortunately, a growing number of scholars have begun to address this imbalance in recent years. A significant milestone in this effort is Buddhist Masculinities, a collected volume edited by Megan Bryson and Kevin Buckelew. This work examines the diverse constructions of masculinity within Buddhist traditions across different historical contexts, emphasizing that Buddhist masculinities are socially constructed and contingent rather than essentialized or static. However, it is important to note that the contributors primarily focus on normative or hegemonic models of masculinity and rely predominantly on prescriptive sources. Consequently, while the volume sheds light on how masculinities were conceptualized, performed, and contested at a discursive level, it provides limited insight into how they were enacted in lived practice—Geng Song’s article being a notable exception. This gap is what my research seeks to address, contributing to the expanding field by examining the everyday experiences of Buddhist clerics beyond prescriptive ideals. In this regard, I join scholars like Xiaofei Kang, whose recent work has complicated our understanding of how hegemonic masculinities have been contested and reformulated across different historical periods.