Sex, law, and society in late imperial China

This dissertation uses the prosecution of sex offenses to investigate ideology and practice in late imperial law, as well as the relation of judicial constructs to norms and practices outside the law. Its basic source is a sample of county and central court cases from the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). My main focus is the criminal category "illicit sex"; but I also use ethnographic evidence in legal cases to explore the role of proscribed sexual relations in the formation of unorthodox household patterns among the marginalized people of late imperial society.; Chapter one clarifies the meaning of "illicit sex" by examining how central courts defined and prosecuted rape; it also assesses change in the judicial treatment of rape from Song through Qing in the context of larger trends. Chapter two analyzes the adaptation of earlier standards for heterosexual offenses to the codification and prosecution of homosexual "sodomy," and locates the judicial construction of "sodomy" in the context of more widespread norms and practices. Chapter three explores the link between sex and property in the official discourse of widow chastity, and shows what uses ordinary people made of that discourse. Chapters four and five examine prostitution and wife-selling in their legal and illegal forms to argue that late imperial judiciaries aimed to restrict the sexual promiscuity of commoners, especially women, rather than the commodification of women per se.; This body of law played a central role in how late imperial states sought to root social order in the gendered hierarchy of marriage that lay at the heart of the patriarchal household. The law's vitality derived from a fundamental coherence with popular norms and practices; even so, the friction between official values and the lived experience of those left out of the valorized pattern helped to generate challenges to patriarchal authority on multiple levels.