UCLA

This thesis examines the practices of asexuality as performed by women in late imperial Chinese literature; by abstaining from sex, I argue, these women wrested autonomy over their sexual bodies from societal norms constructed by men. By understanding asexuality as practices, rather than an identity, I present these women as deviating from typical tropes of female characters in the likeness of fox-spirit succubi or lecherous nuns. Previous works in asexuality studies have focused on Western or modern-day identity, whereas studies on Chinese fictional tales have mostly been focused on both the reader’s and author’s fascination with sex, rather than its absence. This paper seeks to highlight how the boundaries that women set for their own bodies can be interpreted as a spectrum of asexual practices in late imperial Chinese literature. Based on stories of Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi, Li Yu’s Twelve Towers and Silent Operas, and the novel Haoqiu zhuan, I argue that the women’s choices to abstain from sex may have enabled women in late imperial China to reclaim autonomy over their sexual bodies from men. This thesis explores these choices through three categories: 1) religion as an avenue through which women’s bodies are no longer defined by their ability to reproduce in their social roles as wives and mothers; 2) the metaphor of the supernatural, which presents women along a spectrum from exhibiting aggressive female desire to sexual restraint; and, 3) the changing norms of chastity when viewed through women’s social practice rather than absolute moral precepts.