Howard Chiang is associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis. He is the coeditor of Perverse Taiwan (2016) and editor of Sexuality in China: Histories of Power and Pleasure (2018).

After Eunuchs deftly explores how the introduction of Western biomedicine transformed understandings of gender, sexuality, and the body in Chinese contexts from the twentieth century onward. Using an impressive range of sources, Chiang rescues the history of castration—perhaps one of the most notorious culturally overdetermined corporeal subjects—from the legacy of prevailing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives that characterize the practice almost exclusively as backward, traditional, and oppressive. Along the way, Chiang illuminates a host of other practices and corporeal formations by challenging the many essentialisms that still inform our assumptions about the wholeness of the human body. A rich and original work.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Toward a Genealogy of Sex1. China Castrated2. Vital Visions3. Deciphering Desire4. Mercurial Matter5. Transsexual TaiwanConclusion: China Trans FormedList of AbbreviationsNotesBibliographyIndex

Howard Chiang is associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis. He is the coeditor of Perverse Taiwan (2016) and editor of Sexuality in China: Histories of Power and Pleasure (2018).

After Eunuchs deftly explores how the introduction of Western biomedicine transformed understandings of gender, sexuality, and the body in Chinese contexts from the twentieth century onward. Using an impressive range of sources, Chiang rescues the history of castration—perhaps one of the most notorious culturally overdetermined corporeal subjects—from the legacy of prevailing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives that characterize the practice almost exclusively as backward, traditional, and oppressive. Along the way, Chiang illuminates a host of other practices and corporeal formations by challenging the many essentialisms that still inform our assumptions about the wholeness of the human body. A rich and original work.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Toward a Genealogy of Sex1. China Castrated2. Vital Visions3. Deciphering Desire4. Mercurial Matter5. Transsexual TaiwanConclusion: China Trans FormedList of AbbreviationsNotesBibliographyIndex