Sex-Alteration and Carnal Trans/Formations in Sinophone Culture

This paper offers some historical insights on carnal trans/formations in Sinophone culture.  Through the prism of sex-alteration, I discuss how meanings of sex, gender, life, and human nature changed from late imperial to post-socialist China.  Among the topics to be touched upon include early modern accounts of hermaphroditism and sex transformation, the rise of a nationalistic discourse of anti-castration, the introduction of Western biomedicine and sexology, the reconfiguration of norms of truth in relation to the politics of life, and the emergence of transsexuality in post-colonial Sinophone communities.  A unifying thematic preoccupation is the historical problem of Chinese modernity and its associated broader processes of the reconfiguration of the “Chinese body.”