Gender Identities - Final Workshop

Abstracts 

Luisa Stella Coutinho (Max Planck Institue, Frankfurt a. M.)
Finding women’s voices during the Christian Century in Japan: a women’s legal history approach to the missionaries sources

Since the late 19th century, women’s history has grown as a field shown various developments in different countries and according to national historiographies, with a focus on peculiar institutions, feminist movements, and political agendas. In Japan, Takamure Itsue’s analysis of the matrilineal system in the 1930s launched the basis for the field. In the 1980s, women’s history became an academic field divided into specific topics, various interpretative branches, and was also incorporated into English-language scholarship. Although the field has covered almost all periods of Japanese history, few studies have focused on the analysis of Japanese women during the period of contact with Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries. Therefore, this study forwards an approach that examines and revisits women’s history and sources in Japan’s legal history by adding on the normative influences of Christianity and missionaries sources. To do so, I discuss how women’s history has renewed research on the norms of the ritsuryō state that show that the law inspired by Chinese codes was never literally applied in Japan. Instead, local normative practices stood out in daily life. I argue that these interpretations allow the making of a women’s legal history from the perspective of normativities and enable the analysis of women’s status and condition during the period of contact with Christians by focusing on institutions such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, honor, and virginity. In doing so, I want to demonstrate how the role of Christian Japanese women in 16th century Japan redefined social positions and legal categories as they were culturally translated and adapted locally. With this approach I intend to give new interpretations to the missionaries sources during the Christian Century in Japan, such as letters, reports and histories of Japan, beyond nationalist discourses, trade or missionary contextualization, traditional historiographical categorization and acritical interpretations regarding sex and gender.

Xiaohu (Sieghard) Jiang (Yangzhou University)
Pu Songling’s Moral Lesson Diminished: from the Text Hua pi to the Film Painted Skin (2008)

This presentation focuses on how the encounter scene of “Huapi”, a short story written by Pu Songling (1640–1715), are transformed in the film Painted Skin (2008) by the Hong Kong director Gordon Chan (or Chen Jiashang). The film transforms the encounter scene between the female ghost and the man into a formulaic plot of a heroic man saving a fragile and attractive beauty in danger. This adaptation only further consolidates the conventional prejudice that it is usually the female who brings disaster to the male and the social order. However, this presentation argues that Pu Songling’s carefully-designed details have been neglected and as a result his original and subtle moral concern has been erased. To control one’s desire within an appropriate moral boundary is not only a lesson to be learnt and remembered by the female, but also the male. In this way, Pu Songling challenges the traditional reprimand or gender prejudice, and warns that the fall of a decent and promising man, either a young scholar or an experienced general, is sometimes caused by his own incapacity of containing his amorous desire. 

Hope Williard (University of Lincoln)

Women’s Work and Women’s Voices in Late Antique Latin Literature

This paper examines the portrayal women’s voices and women’s work in Latin literature written in Gaul between the fourth through the sixth centuries. While the important studies of Suzanne Wemple, Guy Halsall, and others have illuminated many aspects of elite women’s lives in early medieval Gaul, the period before the sixth century remains comparatively neglected. From the time of the Ovid onwards, male poets appropriated the voices of women in order to entertain and challenge their audiences. Focusing on the epigrams of the fourth century poet Ausonius, written in the voice of his wife Sabina; a letter by the fifth century bishop Sidonius Apollinaris, written to advise a newlywed friend on involving his wife in his literary pursuits; and two poems by the sixth century litterateur Venantius Fortunatus, written in the voice of his patron and friend, Radegund, a former Merovingian queen, I address two issues. Firstly, I argue that these authors’ depiction of female emotion, especially pride and grief, broke new ground in the Latin poetic tradition by depicting women acting with increased authority and agency. Secondly, I explore how this changed image of upper-class women affected the women around them, particularly the enslaved and lower-class women who made their elite lifestyles possible. I pay particular attention to Ausonius’ and Fortunatus’ frequent use of metaphors of weaving and textile work, showing how their depiction of such labour as the work of a single elite woman obscured the contributions of many others. My paper thus provides a new model for thinking about ideas of gender, class, and labour in the study of late antique women.

Sabira Hajdarević (University of Zadar)
Gender Constructing in Aristaenetus’ Collection: “Male” vs. “Female” Letters

The collection entitled Erotic Letters, usually attributed to Aristaenetus, was written in the 5th or 6th century AD. It consists of 50 letters divided into two books, Book I containing 28 and Book II containing 22 of them. My previous research has revealed that the expected gender roles are severely questioned or even inverted in several letters of the Collection. Aristaenetus’ women—especially courtesans, but not only them—are sometimes surprisingly (sexually) assertive, cunning and therefore usually successful when attempting seduction or adultery. On the other hand, men are occasionally sexually objectified, outwitted, declined or repeatedly cheated on.

Since the senders, addressees and protagonists in the Collection are both male and female, I find it important to investigate if the choice of the gender of the correspondents/protagonists of any given letter has an impact on the overall gender construction of that letter (i.e. the course of events and relations depicted). Therefore, I intend to scrutinise the letters and find out which gender is more likely to write and send letters depicting relationships that question/invert the expected gender roles (e.g. repeated (successful) female adulteries, oversexualised wives married to asexual husbands, objectification of men etc.).

The final goal of my research is to investigate if Aristaenetus already had a particular gender construction in mind while he was choosing the gender of his correspondents/protagonists. It is my assumption that he did not make that choice randomly and that the letters written by men might be in concordance with the expected gender roles (e.g. bragging to a male friend), while the ones written by women, especially courtesans, might be the ones displaying the inversion of gender roles.