东亚史和文化评论 Cross Currents-East Asian History and Culture Review.pdfVIP

REVIEW ESSAY What Does It Mean to Be a Man in China? Matthew H. Sommer, Stanford University Bret Hinsch. Masculinities in Chinese History . Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. 208 pp. $81 (cloth), $31 (paper), $30 (ebook). Geng Song and Derek Hird. Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China. Leiden: Brill, 2014. 296 pp. $149 (cloth/ebook). What does it mean to be a man in China? The two studies under review here, both valuable contributions, approach this question in different ways. Bret Hinsch offers a dynasty-by-dynasty overview of the broad sweep of Chinese history, whereas Geng Song and Derek Hird zero in on the contemporary urban scene. But the books have much in common. Both privilege “ideals of manhood,” as Hinsch puts it (10), over lived experience and focus on elites to the exclusion of the vast majority of Chinese men. Both titles employ the plural “masculinities” to emphasize the multiple and sometimes contradictory expressions of manhood found in Chinese culture. Despite that emphatic pluralism, however, the reader is startled to find that the working poor, the peasantry, imbalanced sex ratios, and same-sex desire are all more or less invisible in these accounts. Bret Hinsch, who teaches history at Foguang University in Taiwan, is best known for his pioneering study of what he calls “the male homosexual tradition” in imperial China. That book, Passions of the Cut Sleeve (1990), had its genesis in the thesis Hinsch wrote at Yale University under the guidance of the late historian Jo