Retribution, reward and reincarnation: gender non-normativity as the supernatural in late imperial China’s gender system

Abstract

To overcome the long historiographical and theoretical marginalisation of supernatural elements in the scholarship of Chinese queer history, this article recentres and re-examines the supernatural understanding of gender non-normativity in late imperial China, by analysing the literary constructions of transgressive figures in popular ‘strange’ stories within the context of late imperial gender, family and social systems. The gender non-normativity examined includes unexplained gender transformation, intersex bodies and unregulated same-sex relationships. This article argues that through three main supernatural narratives of retribution, reward and reincarnation, these potentially transgressive bodies and sexual acts were rendered intelligible and incorporated into the existing power structure, by being interpreted through the orthodox gender norms and family values of the corporeal world. The commonalities and differences of these constructs also reveal people’s deeper understandings of gender transgressions and queer sensibilities deeply embedded in supernatural thought. These subjectivities have long been concealed by modern, Western epistemes.