Andre’s Reviews > Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies > Status Update

Yeah, screw this. This is a waste of my time. The historical section had some merit, but the rest is useless to me.

Contemporary Taiwan´? Oh god that is it, I will check the later chapters and if this stays with "contemporary", I will stop this book, because that is useless for me.

I have a serious need to stop this here and now. As he straight up goes to "current" chinese societies, but this book is from 2000 and so it is totally useless to me. In fact, several things before already were pretty unreliable and I notice that his tongzhi so far only covers homo and bisexuals despite his earlier definition.

Tongxinglian or tongxingai is a translation of the Western medical term
"homosexuality," which defines a minority group of individuals according
to their same-sex sexual preference or orientation, as if everyone has a
ccrtain fixed and innate sexual essence.
That confirms what I suspected of this author: He denies something like sexual orientation apparently, so I suspect he is a constructionist.

Funny, considered that this Hong Kong Law was so seldom enforced, you could argue that it was just as tolerant as imperial China, but this author would never do that. He either doesn't know Qing law or downplays that and other things.

This homosexual law is not a reflection of Chinese law or culture but the
imposition of colonial law without any consultation with the colonized
people.
Oh really? Because I could have sworn that the Qing law also criminalized consentual anal sex between two males.

To conclude, it is only since the Republican period that China's Iong
history of cultural tolerance of same-sex eroticism began to fade.
That tolerance was extremely narrow, something he only shortly touched and then ignored. He only mentioned once that homosexuality was not accepted and then never again, which makes his constant talk about tolerance very misleading.

I just noticed that he mostly uses anecdotes and not data. The one piece of data from Taiwan with 26 % of boys and 21 % of girls in these schools encountered same sex eroticism. The rest os anecdotes and assuming literati and the like stand for popular attitudes. And naturally the sex imbalance and Qing law have been ignored so far.

There are public streets füll of boys got up like prostitutes. And there
are people who buy these boys and teach them to play music, sing
and dance. And then, gallantly dressed and made up with rouge like
women these miserable men are initiated into this terrible vice.
And yet he never points this lack of masculine appearance out.

lt was the sexologist's pathologization of homosexuality rather than the
Christian homophobic attitude that was selectively and strategically
adopted by Chinese intellectuals who had their own so~iop?litical agend.a
in mind,