Biography in East Asia during the early modern period (c. 1400-1800) was undergoing changes in its approaches in understanding the lives that people lived. Perhaps the most important change was the questioning of how categories of gender were assigned. Over this period writers and scholars were exploring lives in complex new ways. Our panel will be examining aspects of this process as seen in three case studies representing elite cultures in Choson Korea, Ming China and the Ryūkyū Kingdom under Japan. Mark McNally will begin our panel with an examination of gender conflict in terms of dynastic descent for the royal house of the Ryūkyū kingdom. In particular, McNally argues that Ryūkyū royal descent was constructed in a way to show the greater flexibility of the role of gender and as a counter to Japanese hegemony. Ihor Pidhainy, working on the wives and mothers of elite male scholars, will show how traditional Confucian ideology and its cardinal relationships can through modification better help represent the lives of women during late imperial times. Focusing on the Yang family of Xindu, Sichuan during the 15^th and 16^th centuries, Pidhainy will present a case study on just such a transformation. Sookja Cho through a close reading of Chagi rok (Writing of Self) examines how a female author wrote of the lives of exemplary women as distinct from earlier accounts authored by elite male authors. Her paper extends our discourse on how Confucianism was a force that women contended with on a daily basis and the approaches taken in the autobiography to challenge this discourse. The three papers thus provide complementary arguments for the overall general change in gender by underscoring broader changes in perception of gender through their own distinct studies.