Thursday 3rd February, 16:30-18:00 UK time

Christie Carr (University of Oxford)

Gendered sexuality: Women and the Sumerian Inanna-Dumuzi Texts

The 'Love Songs' of the goddess Inanna and her lover Dumuzi are the earliest known literary texts that share highly erotic, metaphorical language and expressions of female sexuality. Written in Sumerian, they use Emesal, a specific 'female' dialect reserved primarily for the voices of women in poetry, dialogue texts between women and the cultic personnel of lamentation texts. Extant from the Old Babylonian period at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC in Babylonia, these texts exhibit rare, ancient female voices and use metaphorical language to construct an eroticism which centres on female sexual desire and pleasure.

Yet questions of authorship and context have overwhelmed previous scholarship on the Inanna-Dumuzi songs; whilst some of the texts have been said to originate as 'popular ditties such as would be sung by women' (Jacobsen 1976: 27), the majority of scholars consider the texts to operate within the context of the 'Sacred Marriage ritual', a supposed ritual sex act between king and goddess (e.g. Sefati 1998). The extant copies of the texts are far removed from either of these proposed original contexts, surviving in copies from a scribal, pedagogical environment, and likely written down by male scribes.

These texts originated in a patriarchal world, and yet exhibit extraordinary attention to women’s voices, the expression of her desire and pleasure, as well as explicit descriptions of women's bodies, especially the vulva. I'd like to discuss how the Inanna-Dumuzi songs construct these female voices and sexuality through language, the use of Emesal and metaphor. Further, I'd also like to address whether the voices and depictions of the sexualised female body can serve as authentic expressions of female sexual pleasure and experience, or if instead we can only read them as products of a controlling 'male gaze'. 

Julie Chan (University of Oxford)

Fragrance and Female Homosexuality: Revisiting Lian Xiang Ban 憐香伴 and Lin Lan Xiang 林蘭香

Representations of homosexual desire proliferated during late imperial China. While modern scholars offer valuable analysis of male homosexuality with medical, ethnographic, and fictional texts, the issue of female homosexual relationships has not been adequately addressed. My paper approaches this issue by means of a close reading of Li Yu's drama, Lian Xiang Ban, and Suiyuan xiashi's novel, Lin Lan Xiang.

This paper demonstrates the sensory experiences of the female homosexual world. Fragrance, xiang, is embedded in the titles of these stories. In Lian Xiang Ban, the female protagonist’s body carries a natural fragrance, while in Lin Lan Xiang, the protagonist's scent is held by a golden hairpin. It relies on a material object to hold onto it. The scent is not only a means of arousing romantic sentiments in the narratives of female same-sex desires but also a symbolic representation of female homosexual relationships, which depends on polygamous matrimony.

This paper addresses the ambivalence of these two stories, where homosexual bonding is depicted as simultaneously deviating from and vindicating social norms such as chastity and filial piety. The authors appropriate the concept of qing, which plays a key role in elevating same-sex relationships and proposing a solution to the jealousies of polygamous marriage.

The paper proceeds to deal with the concept of yu in these works. The authors establish the propriety of homosexual desire by severing its association with lust. Lust is always an essential part of Li Yu's stories about male homosexuality, but he takes an opposite approach when depicting a female homosexual relationship. Suiyuan xiashi celebrates the protagonists' relationship when it remains platonic, as long as it does not pose a threat to the gendered hierarchy of the household and the core gender values of the patriarchal society.