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Daughter/Wife/Mother or...CONFUCIAN SEXUALIZATION OF YIN-YANG THEORYFrom: Michael Winn
Subject: General
Date/Time 2006-09-10 11:59:03
Remote IP: 66.32.50.129
MessageThanks, Snowlion.
Another nice solid piece on the origins of sexism in application of yin-yang theory to social culture in China.
The key paragraphs in this article: I will shortly be distribuiting on my website both Women in Daoism (kohn & despeaux) and Divine Traces of the Daoist Sisterhood by Cahill.
This polarization of yin-yang into male female is why the alchemical understanding is important to revealing the yin-within-the-yang (and v.v.) nature of not only humans, but nature itself.
michael
"There is an emerging consensus among recent scholars that it was the rigid application of the yin-yang rubric to women and men, respectively, that has led to the repression of women in Confucian thought and practice. There are two aspects to this process that need to be explored: the intellectual and the historical. First, the intellectual point is actually somewhat counter-intuitive, because the yin-yang concept is a principle of complementarity or polarity, which, one would think, would not be consistent with a hierarchical structure. But even before the Han, yin-yang was associated with an implicit hierarchy, since Heaven (above) and Earth (below) were early examples of the distinction.(11a) Yet they were originally seen as functional modes of activity, which both men and women were understood to embody.
The key interpretive shift, which seems to have occurred in the Han and is certainly seen in Dong Zhongshu's writing, was to essentialize men as yang and women as yin:(12) "The husband is yang and the wife is yin;"(13) and "Yin and yang also may be called man and woman, and man and woman may also be called yin and yang."(14) As Chan Sin Yee points out in an excellent essay, the yin-yang concept itself does not imply gender essentialism."
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