This book offers queer readings of Chinese Qing Dynasty zhiguai, ‘strange tales’, a genre featuring supernatural characters and events. In a unique approach interweaving Chinese philosophies alongside critical theories, this book explores tales which speak to contemporary debates around identity and power. Depictions of porous boundaries between humans and animals, transformations between genders, diverse sexualities, and contextually unusual masculinities and femininities, lend such tales to queer readings. Unlike previous scholarship on characters as allegorical figures or stories as morality tales, this book draws on queer theory, animal studies, feminism, and Deleuzian philosophy, to explore the ‘strange’ and its potential for social critique. Examining such tales enriches the scope of historic queer world literatures, offering culturally situated stories of relationships, desires, and ways of being, that both speak to and challenge contemporary debates.
Table of Content
1.
Introduction – Reading the Strange Tales Queerly.- 2. Queerying Identity – Intersecting Identities in Qing Dynasty China.- 3. Transformation as the Nature of Things – Queering the Non/Human in Qing Dynasty Zhiguai.- 4. Alternating States – Queerying Non/Binary Gender in Qing Dynasty Zhiguai.- 5. Strange Women – Queerying Female Sexuality in Qing Dynasty Zhiguai.- 6. Strange Men – Queerying Male Sexuality in Qing Dynasty Zhiguai.- 7. Becoming Perverse – Pornography and Queer Equality in Zhiguai.- 8. Coda – The Resilience of the Strange.
About the author
Thomas William Whyke is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo China.
Melissa Shani Brown is affiliated with the Faculty of East Asian Studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany.
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