Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China.

• Author: Reed, Bradly W.
• Position: Book Review

Sex, Law, and Society in Late imperial China. By MATTHEW H. SOMMER. Stanford: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2000, Pp. xvii + 413, maps. $55.

In this groundbreaking book, Matthew Sommer contributes to a growing body of scholarship that is fundamentally changing our view of the relationship between imperial law and society in China. Contradicting past interpretations of late imperial jurisprudence as a mechanical application of unchanging and moribund statutes, Sommer presents a meticulous reading of codified law and case records pertaining to illicit sex (jian) to demonstrate how legislators and judges of the seventeenth century onward actively used law in an attempt to mitigate the effects of social changes which, they felt, were threatening the moral and social order upon which the imperial edifice rested. In this, Sommer describes what amounted to a monumental effort by the late imperial state at social engineering.

Sommer takes issue with scholars who describe the Qing as having imposed a regime of sexual repression upon the Chinese people. While he does not question claims as to the prudishness of Qing law in regard to sex, he convincingly argues that this is not the most significant story to be told. More important is what he identifies as a "paradigmatic shift" in the way that sexuality was regulated by the state, from a judicial focus on the maintenance of status boundaries to a concern with gender-based performance. The shift in emphasis from status to gender performance is clearly revealed in the Yongzheng emperor's oft-noted abolition of specific debased (jian) status categories. By the seventeenth century, social and geographical mobility within the empire had rendered most of these hereditary categories little more than legal fiction. Rather than interpreting it as a form of emancipation, however, Sommer maintains that the practical effect of abolition was to extend the moral strictures imposed on commoner hou seholds to a much wider segment of the population. For example, with the abolition of "music households" (yuehu), the only status category within which prostitution had traditionally been permitted, the Qing state effectively outlawed prostitution for the entire population. Henceforth, all people were to he held to the same uniform standard of sexual morality, as well as criminal liability, and to conform to gender rules strictly defined in terms of marriage.

The creation of a single standard of acceptable sexual conduct for...