Скачать или смотреть Elegance in Ambiguity: Courtesan Culture & Gender Fluidity in The Late Ming Dynasty (ANTH 490)

Abstract:

In Ming dynasty China (1368–1644), elite courtesans emerged as powerful yet paradoxical figures, navigating visibility, intimacy, and aesthetic performance in a society governed by rigid Confucian ideals. While women were expected to remain chaste, obedient, and confined to the domestic sphere, courtesans cultivated public identities as poets, musicians, calligraphers, and intellectual collaborators. Their presence in salons and literati circles blurred the lines between artistry and seduction, virtue and vice. This paper draws on Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performance, as well as archival texts, loyalist poetry, and Ming visual culture, to argue that courtesans used ritualized femininity as a strategic tool. Through this lens, the study contributes to broader anthropological conversations around gender, cultural performance, historical agency, and moral ideology – challenging Western-centered notions of femininity and subjectivity. By examining their cultural labor during a time of dynastic upheaval, including their role in loyalist resistance movements, this research reinterprets the courtesan not as a peripheral figure but as a central agent of cultural negotiation, whose performances exposed the instability of gender norms and the moral contradictions of early modern Chinese society.