Hsiao-wen Cheng – författare

Female chastity stirs trouble in medieval ChinaA variety of Chinese writings from the Song period (960–1279)—medical texts, religious treatises, fiction, and anecdotes—depict women who were considered peculiar because their sexual bodies did not belong to men. These were women who refused to marry, were considered unmarriageable, or were married but denied their husbands sexual access, thereby removing themselves from social constructs of female sexuality defined in relation to men. As elite male authors attempted to make sense of these women whose sexual bodies were unavailable to them, they were forced to contemplate the purpose of women’s bodies and lives apart from wifehood and motherhood. This raised troubling new questions about normalcy, desire, sexuality, and identity. In Divine, Demonic, and Disordered, Hsiao-wen Cheng considers accounts of “manless women,” many of which depict women who suffered from “enchantment disorder” or who engaged in “intercourse with ghosts”—conditions with specific symptoms and behavioral patterns. Cheng questions conventional binary gender analyses and shifts attention away from women’s reproductive bodies and familial roles. Her innovative study offers historians of China and readers interested in women, gender, sexuality, medicine, and religion a fresh look at the unstable meanings attached to women’s behaviors and lives even in a time of codified patriarchy.

Female chastity stirs trouble in medieval ChinaA variety of Chinese writings from the Song period (960–1279)—medical texts, religious treatises, fiction, and anecdotes—depict women who were considered peculiar because their sexual bodies did not belong to men. These were women who refused to marry, were considered unmarriageable, or were married but denied their husbands sexual access, thereby removing themselves from social constructs of female sexuality defined in relation to men. As elite male authors attempted to make sense of these women whose sexual bodies were unavailable to them, they were forced to contemplate the purpose of women’s bodies and lives apart from wifehood and motherhood. This raised troubling new questions about normalcy, desire, sexuality, and identity. In Divine, Demonic, and Disordered, Hsiao-wen Cheng considers accounts of “manless women,” many of which depict women who suffered from “enchantment disorder” or who engaged in “intercourse with ghosts”—conditions with specific symptoms and behavioral patterns. Cheng questions conventional binary gender analyses and shifts attention away from women’s reproductive bodies and familial roles. Her innovative study offers historians of China and readers interested in women, gender, sexuality, medicine, and religion a fresh look at the unstable meanings attached to women’s behaviors and lives even in a time of codified patriarchy.

What makes something a medicine? To answer this deceptively simple question, Global Lives of Medicines offers twelve richly detailed biographies of medicinal substances across Asian history. From ginseng and frankincense to aconite, radish, and live leeches, contributors trace how materials moved through markets, temples, courts, homes, and laboratories while continually acquiring new meanings and uses.Across the chapters, familiar categories begin to dissolve. Substances may function simultaneously as food, poison, ritual tool, or sacred object. Healing agents may be plant roots, minerals, aromatics, or even living creatures. Through these diverse case studies spanning East and South Asia, Global Lives of Medicines demonstrates how the boundaries between medicine, technology, religion, and commerce were constantly negotiated in different historical contexts. By placing these biographies in dialogue, it offers a new approach to the history of medicine—one that foregrounds the materiality, mobility, and cultural transformation of therapeutic substances across Asia.