Time/Date: 6:30 - 8:30 pm, Tuesdays, November 11th - January 6th (no class on December 30th)

Course fee: 250 - 360 USD (sliding scale, pay what you can)

Course description: How did imperial China imagine love, virtue, and desire before modern ideas of sexuality or gender equality emerged?

This course explores how gender and power were organized and contested across China’s imperial past, with a focus on the Ming–Qing period to the late Qing, when new colonial and global encounters began to reshape the meanings of intimacy and modernity. We move from the cut-sleeve tales of emperors and courtiers to the ambiguous status of eunuchs in the Qing court, from family laws that defined virtue and deviance to the practice of footbinding as beauty, discipline, and a site of civilization and shame.

Drawing on historiography as well as primary literature, art, and legal and medical texts, students will trace how Confucian ideals, bodily practices, and everyday intimacies shaped social order, and how these traditions collided with the pressures of empire and modern reform. By the end of the course, we uncover the complex worlds of gender and desire that predated, and helped give rise to, modern debates over sexuality, morality, and national identity.

Instructor: Luna