Transgressive Typologies: Constructions of Gender and Power in Early Tang China.

• Author: Hong, Yue
• Position: Book review

Transgressive Typologies: Constructions of Gender and Power in Early Tang China. By REBECCA DORAN. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monographs, vol. 103. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY ASIA CENTER, HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS. Pp. viii + 260. $39.95.

Although Wu Zhao [phrase omitted] (624-705) and the following generation of female leaders ruled competently during the late seventh and early eighth centuries, their rule has primarily been remembered as a "female-led aberrance" within the Chinese literary-historical tradition. In Transgressive Typologies, Rebecca Doran shows the ways historians and writers constructed this era as transgressive by associating female power with the reversal of gender roles and narrative typologies that embody unnaturalness, excess, and sexual deviance.

The central image here is a woman's transgression: she fails to recognize her proper cosmological role and ritual place, is promiscuous, and engages in improper sexual relationships. Why has this era been retrospectively reconstructed as transgressive? Doran suggests two reasons. The first has to do with women power holders' subversion of normative gender hierarchies and roles established since the Eastern Han. Just as "subservient" roles of mother and wife were defined as "natural," women rulers were perceived as "unnatural." The second concerns specific historical circumstances. Following Wu Zhao's death, two factions vied for power. When Li Longji [phrase omitted] (Xuanzong [phrase omitted]; r. 712-756) took the throne, writers under the new regime condemned the Wu-Zhou period and its female leaders to burnish the legitimacy of Li-Tang rule.

The book's introduction outlines the study's scope and focus. Doran is most concerned with portrayals of early Tang women leaders found in Tang through Southern Song sources. As she explains, the anecdotal collections compiled two to four generations after the female leaders' deaths played a pivotal role in crafting the canonical, transgressive image; by the Song, their reputations within the historical and literary traditions were essentially fixed. This being the case, only when there are important discrepancies between representations does she consider later sources from the Ming and Qing. Doran's basic questions are: "How did the images of the female leaders from the Wu-Zhou period [...] through the Jinglong era become crystalized in the rhetoric of history, historical romance, and fiction? What assumptions inform the process of negative 'canonization?'" (p. 16). Her focus on the construction of cultural images and values allows Doran...