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...been, until recently, mostly medical their orientation. This paper reviews the most important of these studies, which are vastly different in their perspectives on women's sexuality, their methodological approaches used to gather data, and their construction of the images of women. The goals of this meta-analysis are to trace the process of development of a generative typology, which started with certain gender stereotypes that were later questioned, revised, supplemented, or displaced by competing typologies and classifications. Various academic disciplines (e.g., medicine, social sciences, humanities, and law) have introduced complementary and yet competing discourses on sex. This analysis shows how sexuality has been constructed and developed in academic discourse in China, assesses the contribution of the reports and papers reviewed, and addresses key issues concerning research on women and sexuality in China.
Methodology
This review of sexuality studies in China is presented in two parts. In the first section, the researchers use a content analysis approach to examine the main databases of research published in China since 1980. In the second part, the works of prominent scholars are critically reviewed for their analyses of female sexuality.
Four key Chinese databases have served as the main sources of the first part of our research.
1. CJN (China Journals Net), which contains full-text articles from 5,000 reference journals and the titles of articles from 6,600 journals published in China since 1994.
2. RUC (Renmin University of China Database), the most comprehensive database for the subjects of social science and humanities in China. It contains all full-text articles from 3,500 journals since 1995 and the indexes of 2,300,000 articles published since 1979.
3. CDMD (China Doctoral Dissertations & Master's Theses Full-text Databases), which has a collection of 300,000 Master's and PhD dissertations submitted since 2000.
4. CPCD (China Proceedings of Conferences Database), which contains proceedings from national and international conferences and seminars on the latest research from academic associations, industrial organizations, governmental agencies, and international bodies in China.
Together, these four databases include virtually all the reference journals published in China. There are four main disciplines used in the construction of the databases:
1. Medicine/hygiene (MED)
2. Social Science/education (SOC)
3. Literature/history/philosophy (LIT)
4. Law/economics/politics (LAW)
Using a content analysis approach, the researchers searched the databases electronically, generating a lexicon of key terms and identifying frequently occurring key terms. (1) Using these key terms as search words, the researchers sorted out the articles by category, discipline and period, and were thus able to trace the development of different disciplines in the area of sex research. The works of prominent, influential scholars who have published frequently were then critically examined for their analysis of female sexuality.
Results
The total number of articles and the five most frequent key terms in each discipline are listed in Table 1 (see Table 1). It shows that the volume of articles on sex research greatly exceeds that of other categories or disciplines.
The researchers have chosen to track the developments in each discipline by comparing the number of articles on a 5-year basis from 1980 to 2000, and on a year-to-year basis from 1994 to 2004. The reason for using this method is that annual comparison is appropriate for more recent years, following the rapid proliferation of publications, but for earlier periods when there was a smaller volume of publications, it seemed sensible to look at five-year periods. We used 1981 as the starting point of the comparison because there were no articles on sex in the RUC before that year.
Table 2 reflects identified developments in sex research outside the medical area, with social sciences and education dominating the sexual research field (see Table 2).
Table 3 depicts the trends of sex research in China over the past 10 years (see Table 3)
Figure 1 indicates that there has been a progressive increase in the number of academic publications on sex and sexuality in China over the last twenty years, and that such publications were rare before the mid-1980s (see Appendix, Figure 1). Medical articles were the first to be published and they have continued to represent the majority of publications over the last two decades. There is, nonetheless, a new phase characterized by increased input from the social sciences and humanities, which begins in the 1990s. It seems that growth has been uneven across these disciplines.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
The kind of crude quantitative data presented above gives a general picture of the trends in the number of studies in different disciplines. Looking more closely at the content and stance of the publications on sex and sexuality published in the last 20 years, a number of developmental stages can be identified. The first or early stage of academic publication on sexuality (1980-1985) was characterized by medicalisation, privileged as an objective, scientific, and therefore politically "uncontroversial" discourse, which was tolerated by the authorities in the eighties when political stability was of critical significance. These medical publications continued to be cherished under a dominant discourse valuing whatever was seen as "scientific" and "modern." The introduction of social sciences and humanities theories and research marked another stage of development (1986-1995), during which sexuality was framed as a social or human phenomenon, not only a medical or biological fact. The involvement of the social sciences and humanities contributed to the development of a multi-disciplinary domain of study, sometimes labeled sexology, representing another stage (1996-2003) of development. This stage witnessed an increase in the number of academic disciplines involved (e.g., sociology, history, law, etc.) as well as the number of perspectives (e.g., feminism and the idea of original indigenous voices). Whereas medical and social science articulations in the first two stages were often presented in an authoritative voice, in the third stage there was a shift towards pluralistic articulations, critical engagement and contestation. It should be noted that the stages do not mark discrete periods of historical development, but only indicate the time of introduction of additional types of discursive voices to the field.
These very general observations suggest that there has been a shift of emphasis over the past thirty years, from a very narrow focus on the medical aspects of sexuality towards a more broadly based discourse, to which scholars from non-medical disciplines have contributed more frequently. This shift is discussed in more detail in the following sections.
Discussions
Stage I: The Medicalization of Sex
During the Cultural Revolution, which lasted for 10 years and ended with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, any suggestion of sex in fiction, poetry or drama was enough to have "the offending work removed from circulation and its author punished" (Evans, 1997, p. 7). Even when associated with "a critique of feudal forms of exploitation," sex could not be mentioned in public (Evans, 1997, p. 7). After the Cultural Revolution, there was a revival of publications on sex. Some scholars, especially members of the medical profession, began to publish translated books or edited texts from Western studies on sex-related issues.
With the introduction of China's economic reform and the "Open Door" Policy of the 1980s, there came more dramatic social changes, including what appeared to be a liberalization of social and sexual mores (Pan, 1993; Zha & Geng, 1992). From the early 1980s, sex-related topics have no longer been a taboo. At that time the press began to feature debates on the pros and cons of sex education. Since the conservatives were concerned that "public exposition of sex-related issues would encourage promiscuous behavior" (Honig & Hershatter, 1988, p. 53), these debates tended to rely on scientific sex knowledge and focus on sexual health rather than on issues related to sexual morals and pleasure. Experts, almost all from medical schools, thus appeared as authorized sex educators who could teach scientific sex knowledge to the masses and provide consultations on sexual problems so that people could improve their "sexual health". Western works, such as the Textbook of Sexual Medicine coauthored by William H. Masters, Virginia E. Johnson,...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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