ABSTRACT
In this chapter I explore the articulations between social dimensions of biopower and theories of fertility and natural kinship in late imperial China, asking how important a woman’s capacity to give birth was to her status and security. Margery Wolf (1972) issued a feminist challenge to the anthropological models of Chinese kinship, which mirrored orthodox patrilineal ideology in treating women as little more than ‘borrowed wombs’.3 Arguing for the importance of ‘uterine families’, Wolf showed how the women in the Taiwanese villages where she conducted her fieldwork compensated for their lack of formally endorsed social agency by working to create close and enduring emotional bonds with their sons. These intimate attachments gave them influence over and through their sons, constituting a source of power and protection. Wolf ’s woman-centred concept of uterine families, and the dimensions of female agency it suggested, have been extremely influential in shaping feminist rethinking of kinship and gender relations in China, past and present. The concept did, however, echo both traditional Chinese doxa and the patrilineally framed anthropological models it challenged, in implying that a woman’s natural fertility determined what bonds of relatedness she could build for herself. So was biology destiny for Chinese women? ‘While everywhere social
arrangements attend to the production and rearing of children, it is not everywhere that the facts of procreation are taken to be of prime significance’ (Strathern 1999: 23). In our own society, reproductive technologies such as artificial insemination or surrogate motherhood have recently forced us to rethink what ‘real’ relatedness might be when the ‘facts of procreation’ expand to include more than one mother or father. The resulting conflicts and tensions are not eased by the exclusionary principles of modern Western legal and administrative systems, which normally recognize one, and only one, official parent of each sex. Late imperial China was a patrilineal, polygynous society with its own
forms and practices of surrogacy or multiple parenthood. Multiple fatherhood
was not unusual, most commonly resulting from the adoption of a son. Not surprisingly within a system of strict patrilineal descent, adoption was not easy to accommodate institutionally and was always considered fundamentally problematic (Sommer 2005; Waltner 1990). Multiple maternity, on the other hand, was comfortably accommodated within the moral, legal and ritual institutions of an officially polygynous society. It was condoned and commonplace, and unproblematic in principle if often very painful in practice. There were thus several legitimate social techniques for overcoming what we might see as biological impediments to the smooth path of patrilineal descent, and it is interesting to consider how such arrangements were naturalized, how the ‘facts of procreation’ were construed and how ‘real’ relatedness was evaluated in late imperial society. I draw here on medical and social sources from the Ming and Qing
period, from about 1500 to 1750, to explore how parent-child bonds were conceptualized and produced, and how biological and social contributions were likely to be ranked. I focus principally on motherhood, outlining the spectrum of maternal roles and the range of resources available to more privileged women to achieve desirable forms of relatedness. I suggest that the institution of polygyny legally and ritually facilitated, while medical theory naturalized, a form of maternal ‘doubling’ whereby a pair of women of different social status could jointly fulfil the biological and social roles of ideal motherhood, at very different costs to each of the women.4 I conclude by asking whether any traces of this late imperial reproductive culture have resurfaced in contemporary debates about surrogacy in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
