Coming to terms with Chastity: Strategic Uses of Religion for Women Sexuality in Medieval China

This paper attempts to recover women’s voices about their sexuality by tracing how women in medieval China might have strategically used religion to overcome the silencing of female sexual desire. This paper first examines a medieval litigation text judging a widow’s application for official recognition as a chaste woman on the grounds that she was rewarded by Heaven for pregnancy due to her commitment to her deceased husband. By turning the Confucian ideology – good acts elicit supernatural rewards – on its head, the widow sought to have sexual activities without having her reputation compromised. Foregrounding women’s sexual agency, this paper then offers an innovative reading of a type of tales about the seduction of women by deities. I propose to treat the invocation of deities as serving an exculpatory function for “illicit” sexual conduct. Overall, this paper aims to understand women’s sexual agency within the given oppressive cultural and historical contexts.