Glands, Insanity, Criminality, and Desire: Female Same-Sex Love Murder and Culpability in 1930s China

In February 1932, Tao Sijin fatally stabbed her girlfriend and National Hangzhou Fine Arts Academy classmate, Liu Mengying. The murder and the women’s three-and-a-half-year-long romance were scrutinized in three subsequent trials, extensive media reports, works of fiction, cartoons, and autobiographical memoirs. The “Tao/Liu Affair” became the decade’s watchword for the noxious effects of same-sex love and the particular menace of lesbians, whose disregard for social conventions and the biological imperative to reproduce could undercut the nation’s very existence. The “Affair” was popularly characterized as singularly shocking and perverse. Nonetheless, a few critical voices noted contrarily that its lingering notoriety and capacity to stoke anxiety lay in the burgeoning prevalence of the women’s “abnormality” and the potential vulnerability of all female students to same-sex love amid the widespread development of women’s education in Republican China (1912-1949).

Drawing on European, Japanese, and Chinese sexology, and medical research, commentators analyzed Tao’s mental and physical state to diagnose why she had transitioned from healthy short-term same-sex love, an endemic feature of single-sex educational institutions that prepared one for heterosexual love and marriage, to morbid long-term same-sex love and then murder. Some identified neurasthenia, or glands and secretions. Others accentuated insanity, the result of congenital brain defects. Still others blamed willfulness and malice. A few apologists celebrated the women’s love and faulted societal stigma for the killing. These etiologies of Tao’s lesbian and murderous impulses variously assigned or excused her culpability, pointing to modernity, society, female physiology, and disease as possible causes. In addition to determining whether Tao should be subject to the death penalty, these theories highlighted the ease with which love in the modern age could “go wrong,” leading to same-sex love and murder.