Speaker: Professor Matthew H. Sommer, Bowman Family Professor of History, Stanford University
Discussant: Professor Bin Bin Yang, Associate Professor, School of Chinese, HKU
Chair: Professor Weilin Xiao, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, HKU
Date & Time: September 4, 2025 (Thursday) 16:00-18:00
Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Language: English
(In-person event)
Registration Link: http://bit.ly/3GGgBat
Matthew Sommer’s new book The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China(Columbia UP 2024)considers a range of transgender experiences in Ming-Qing China, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular contexts and penalized in others. This talk focuses on the crime of “a male masquerading in female attire” (男扮女裝), which was prosecuted by applying the statute against “using deviant ways and heterodox principles to incite and deceive the common people” (左道異端煽惑人民). Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupation such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit — yet, suspected of sexual predation, they risked death if they came to official attention, even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for years.
Matthew H. Sommer (BA Swarthmore, MA U. of Washington, PHD UCLA) is the Bowman Family Professor of History at Stanford University. A social and legal historian of Qing dynasty China (1644-1912), his research uses original legal case records from local and central archives to explore gender, sexuality, and family. He is the author of Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford 2000) and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China (California 2015), which was the inaugural winner of the American Society for Legal History’s Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. His latest book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia 2024) won the Boswell Prize from the LGBTQ+ History Association.
This seminar is co-organised by the Philip K.H. Wong Centre for Chinese Law in the Faculty of Law, and the Department of History and Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong.
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