Wow! eBook
Western Queers in China: Flight to the Land of Oz
Author(s): D. E. Mungello (Author)
- Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (UK)
- Publication Date: 16 Feb. 2012
- Language: English
- Print length: 212 pages
- ISBN-10: 1442215569
- ISBN-13: 9781442215566
Book Description
Mungello explores historical attitudes and the atmosphere of oppression toward men with same-sex desire as he recounts the intensification of repression of queers in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth-century. He shows how China became a place of escape, a homosexual “land of Oz” where men could flee from the closets of their minds. Some traveled to China and lived there; others immersed themselves in Chinese culture at a distance. Most established long-term friendships and acted as cultural intermediaries who opened the aesthetic range of Western culture to a new sense of beauty and a fresh source of inspiration for poets, artists, and dramatists. Their “boys”—Chinese males whose services were available at low cost as messengers, rickshaw pullers, guides, cooks, entertainers, escorts, and prostitutes—were transformed into a universal metaphor of Chinese culture that lingers to this day. Indeed, outside men’s range of relationships, intellectual and physical, have had a profound impact in shaping the modern Western conception of China.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Mungello has succeeded in vividly, empathetically and convincingly characterising a wide array of queer men, while acknowledging any gaps or uncertainties in the evidence. The book is a lucid, focused and coherent study on an under-researched topic, and deserves special respect for its broadening of the focus of LGBT/Queer research within Chinese Studies.
This is a fascinating journey into the lives of a number of Western men who, especially at the turn of last century, felt irresistibly attracted to China, traveled there, and sometimes made it their home. Aesthetes and art collectors, pharmacists, poets and opera fans, eccentric Sinologists–what drew these men to China? Many of them, David Mungello suggests, shared a most private and powerful secret–their homosexuality. Much has been written about orientalists as complicit agents of the colonial enterprise. Mungello’s book offers a corrective, showing that at least some of them might have been sexual refugees more than anything else.
This is a fascinating read for anyone involved with China. David Mungello’s novel focus on sexual orientation and Sinology illuminates the individuality of these cultural pioneers to striking effect.
This is a heartfelt tour of sinology’s gay male closet, the door for some of the scholars and ‘aesthetes’ who journeyed from the West to China locked more tightly than for others. By consulting archives and attempting personal contact with surviving family and friends (not all of whom agreed to talk), historian Mungello tells the ‘story of how twenty-three different men with same-sex desire fled to China and influenced history.’ . . . Throughout, Mungello asks a familiar question–What links a (Western, male) homosexual orientation with a passion for Asia?–but from a newer perspective: China hands in the Age of Imperialism. His book is informed, entertaining, and melancholy in equal measure. The heart may be unfathomable, but Mungello has proven it is there.
