Customer Reviews

Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China

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I've seen some somewhat unfair criticisms of this book on here, so I'd like to set the record straight. I'm an American graduate student studying in Taiwan, and my field of studies is Chinese homoerotic literature. It is true that Hinsch's book is a bit outdated, but it was the first of it's kind in English, and I still find many good insights in my own research. Before this book's publication, there was very little research on this topic either in the West or in China/Taiwan. In recent years, a number of scholars have taken up this subject and there have been a number of intruiging articles and books published. Hinsch's work provided the impetus for more research in this field, which is exactly what the author's purpose in writing it was. As for the secondary research material in Chinese that some reviewers believe is superior, I have found it to be exactly the opposite. While there are some books and quite a few articles on the subject in Chinese, they are heavy on primary source material and light on good analysis and lack much application of good literary criticism or theory. This is the advantage that Sinology in the West maintains over research in China/Taiwan. I would definitely recommend that no one overlook or dismiss this excellent book by Dr. Hinsch! By the way, he now does research on women in Chinese history, and has published a book called "Women in Early Imperial China," as well as a number of articles. They are all well worth looking at!

There are not many resources on the history of Homosexuality in China and many Chinese will tell you that there isn't a history of it at all. This book spans two thousand years of history to show that there was a gay literary tradition in China. It is really the first work of the kind on China in English. It is full of romantic antidotes, poetry and stories from a time that China, particularly under communist influence has tried to deny or at least forget.

Personally I would like to see an update of this first work or the expansion by another author on other Asian countries like Korea where their homophobia has also prevailed and they have taken to rewriting pages of history.

This delightfully accessible book on an inaccessible topic provides an appetizing read. Bejeweled with wonderful quotations which are variously elegant, erotic, bawdy, and sometimes just simply endearing, the author reviews the two thousand year literary tradition of male same-sex attraction known as the "cut sleeve" (based on a lovely story which I will not spoil by recounting). In the course of this overview, the author provides interesting evidence of the benefits to kinship groups of same-sex relationships as well as the manner in which this tradition harmonized with reproductive marriage. Lastly, he describes how this tradition was lost--though one suspects that his explanation based on western cultural influence does not do justice to indigenous circumstance.

Anyone who can read Chinese would do better to find Xiaomingxiong's ZHONGGUO TONGXINGAI SHILU (a 2nd edition of which has just been published).

Even if the only originality is the language and some of the readings are naive(ly romantic), this book presents the best survey IN ENGLISH of male-male love across three millennia of Chinese literature and chronicles and points readers to literature both in Chinese and English bearing on the subject

This is the best book on the history of male-love in Chinese history written in English, and Xiaomingxiong's ZHONGGUO TONGXINGAI SHILU is the best one on the same topic written in Chinese. However in both of them, even I a Japanese can indicate some omissions of important persons and famous stories.

If you read Chinese, you can find better books. A good example is Samshasha's Zhongguo Tongxingai Shilu (Chinese Homosexual Histories), available in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Samshasha's work is much richer and more substantial. Compared to Samshasha's work, this book by Bret Hinsch is really light. By the way, Samshasha's book in its first print is published many years before Bret Hinsch. The newer version of Samshasha's book, published in late 1990s, certainly surpasses Bret Hinsch much more. If you want reliable scholarhsip, do not rely on this English book only.

the book is problmatic. reason (1): it is outdated. it should be updated, when the lesbian and gay texts and contexts in the chinese socieites are so available now. it is dangerous to rely on the book, published in 1990, since so many major LGBT issues happened during the 1990s. (2) the methodology in the book is somehow simplified and naive. it does not read through the material thouroughly enough.
i agree that this book has its own historic value, but we need to expect more professional works on the field.
actually many good books on the field are in chinese, and they are much more reliable. interested readers should try to approach them.

Bret has demonstrated an academic book can be fun to read. It is both educational and entertaining. I highly recommend it.