Debby Chih-Yen Huang obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania after receiving her BA and MA degrees at National Taiwan University. She now is a postdoctoral fellow at Academia Sinica. Her research spans social, cultural, and gender history of medieval China, contributing several articles to peer-reviewed journals. Huang authored Princess Politics: A Gendered Investigation into the Political History of Early Medieval China (2013, in Chinese, with a simplified Chinese edition forthcoming this year). She is now developing a book manuscript titled More Than Friends: Gender, Space, and Interpersonal Relations in Medieval China, 3rd – 10th Centuries, which examines the formation of male bonds from a gender perspective, emphasizing the indispensable role of wives and mothers.
This talk showcases the constructive role of mothers in the formation of male bonding during medieval China, with an emphasis on the Tang dynasty (618-907). The practice of making obeisance to mothers extended beyond a mere family ritual, serving as a crucial mechanism for creating quasi-kinship bonds. Tang intellectuals not only recognized this practice but also conceptualized it within broader frameworks of rituals, emotional attachment, and gender norms. The practice of making obeisance to mothers evolved to gain strategic importance among regional military leaders, emerging as a thoughtful act of goodwill aimed at easing political discord. By redefining the image of women at elite men’s social functions, this research demonstrates that the politicization of domestic space, the reconfiguration of gender relations, and the display of friendship and fraternity together characterized male bonding in medieval China.
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