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The Culture of Sex in Ancient China. By PAUL RATIKA GOLDIN. Honolulu; University of Hawai'i Press, 2002 viii, 231 pp. $24.95 (paper); $47.00 (cloth).
This book bundles together two reworked articles, one new chapter, and an epilogue that aim to shed new light on the subject of sex as "one of the most important topics of human speculation" (p. 1) in ancient China. Paul Ratika Goldin's motivation is twofold. First is to examine sex in its contemporary cultural environment and hence offer an intellectual antidote to the hitherto most authoritative treatment of the subject in a Western language, R. H. van Gulik's Sexual Life in Ancient China (1961). Van Gulik's study, as Goldin rightfully remarks, is based on outdated nineteenth-- century European, read Freudianesque, paradigms of inquiry. Second, the book aims to provide comparativists and theorists with a new account of ancient Chinese attitudes toward sex (p. 3). Throughout the book the author presents multiple primary source passages in carefully crafted translations accompanied by commentary and analysis. The main arguments running through the book, then, are that ancient Chinese texts are replete with discourse on sex (chapter 1); that pre-imperial Chinese attitudes toward women were more diverse and multifaceted than one-sided interpretations of Confucian ideology have made us believe (chapter 2); and, finally, that the moralization and ritualization of sexual behavior ought to be seen as the product of early imperial ideologies that put sexual misconduct on a par with social and political subversion (chapter 3).
Chapter 1 ("Imagery of Copulation") examines recurrent metaphors of sexual union or separation in pre-imperial literary texts (reviewed are, among others, the image...