What Sticks

Sinophone culture. Here, Chiang neatly locates these stories of corporeal variance within the convergence of culture and geopolitics in early Cold War Taiwan. This book makes a rich and imaginative contribution to discussions about the psychobiological understandings of sex and sexuality that emerged in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By showing the significance of those decades between empire and communism as an important interlude in China’s modern history, Chiang’s work challenges the view that only after the economic reforms in the 1970s did China open up to the global circulation of ideas regarding sex, sexuality, and the body. Drawing attention to sexual knowledge as a significant element in the formulation of Chinese modernity, his book also provides an engaging, innovative analysis of the gradual displacement of colonial modernity by Sinophone articulations from the middle of the twentieth century onward. After Eunuchs will be of great interest and importance to scholars working on the history of science and medicine, sex and sexuality, and Chinese modernity.