Home > Catalogue > Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale > 58 | 2022 > Gendering Piety, Justice and Violence: On the Aesthetics of Self-Killing in Han-Chinese, Naxi and Lahu Cultures (from the Late-Ming to Mid-20th Century)

Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale | Vol. 58 | June 2022

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Research Article

Gendering Piety, Justice and Violence: On the Aesthetics of Self-Killing in Han-Chinese, Naxi and Lahu Cultures (from the Late-Ming to Mid-20th Century)

Tommaso Previato    Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan    

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abstract

Self-killing in late imperial and modern China called into play gender disparities, and secular and religious morals often at odds with each other. Scholarship has long focused on Confucian virtue ethics that led young widows to follow their husband to death, or take a chastity vow and disfigure themselves to avoid rape, but little effort has been made to examine suicide practices cross-culturally. This paper compares such practices among Han women from the southeast coast and indigenous Naxi and Lahu women of upland Yunnan, throwing light on the aesthetics behind their struggles for justice, free-choice marriage and beliefs in posthumous love.

Published
June 30, 2022
Accepted
June 6, 2022
Submitted
April 13, 2022
Language
EN

Keywords: Afterlife beliefs • Suicide • Gender-role distinctions • Self-inflicted violence • Filiality

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOr/2385-3042/2022/01/019

Copyright: © 2022 Tommaso Previato. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.