Quilts and Quivers: Dis/covering Chinese Male Homoeroticism

Abstract

In the past ten years there has been increasing Westernacademic interest in male homoeroticism in late imperial China.This paper sets out to assess the strategies through which the issuehas become problematized. and to argue that a number ofmisunderstandings about homoeroticism in Chinese history resultfrom an uncritical and unreflexive application of pre-given Westerncategories and assumptions. What is often framed in terms ofdiscovery or even "recovery," in recent interpretations ofhomoerotic sensibilities among the literati in late imperial China,may be read as rather a re-covering, or what we will call a"dis/covering," one that returns as a form of "covering." Thisinadvertent oscillation originates from, and points to, a form oferotophobia that might be styled as "covering with discourse," andin the absence of ironic reflection it betrays continuities with otherexpressions of neocolonialism.