Dissertation Information for Lisa Tran NAME: - Lisa Tran
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2005)
ADVISORS: - Philip C.C. Huang - Kathryn Bernhardt
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Lynn A. Hunt - Shu-mei Shih
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Concubines under modern Chinese law
Abstract: As a history of the custom of concubinage and the lives of concubines under the Guomindang (GMD) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), this study uses the law as a lens through which to view historical change. Based on legal case records, government documents and periodical literature, the dissertation analyzes the gender dynamics at work in the courtroom and in the media, which operated as public sites of contestation about women and their place in early twentieth-century China.
As a legal history, the dissertation explores how the introduction of Western legal ideas in the early twentieth century challenged and reworked late imperial notions of monogamy and concubinage. These terms had long existed in the Chinese lexicon, but they acquired new meanings in the twentieth century. Monogamy now included the idea of conjugal fidelity, which justified the regulation of male sexuality in the same way female sexual activities had always been controlled. And concubinage---which in the Qing had been sanctioned as a semi-legitimate marriage---was now considered in legal theory to be adultery by the GMD and bigamy by the CCP. In practice, the GMD's placement of concubinage under the adultery laws---with all its loopholes---largely left the custom intact, while CCP law's categorization of concubinage as bigamy empowered officials to successfully prosecute concubinage cases and effectively end the custom.
As a social history of concubines, the study contests conventional views that attribute a concubine's victimization to her marginal kinship status, contending instead that the extent to which a concubine could exercise agency depended on how law and society defined the nature of her relationship to her master and his family; while kinship represented one way that relationship could be expressed, it was by no means the only way. Both the GMD and the CCP repudiated the Qing conception of the concubine as a minor wife, with the GMD identifying her as a household member and the CCP recognizing her as a legal wife. As the legal nature of a concubine's relationship to her master and his family changed, so too did the variety and range of rights and options available to her.
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MPACT Scores for Lisa Tran A = 0
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calculated 2008-08-10 12:08:53
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