Becoming-Perverse: Pornography and Queer Sexual Equality in Zhiguai

In this chapter, we explore the more explicit depiction and discussion of sexuality in zhiguai, focusing upon an episode from Songzhuxuan’s pornographic Yaohu Yanshi, and several tales from Yuan Mei. We focus on how the pornographic mode brings sex to the foreground—by making sex an explicit topic, the idea of sex and sexuality is grappled with. The underlying theme of our analysis is an exploration of the ways in which some of these depictions queer and ‘pervert’ (vis-à-vis Deleuze in Critical Inquiry 23:225–230, 1997) taken-for-granted notions of sexuality in their original context. This includes depictions of male same-sex relationships which are extremely unusual in describing reciprocal relations. This not only queers the usual depictions of male same-sex acts, which tend to represent such relationships as inherently hierarchical, it queers the usual framing of sexuality generally as an enactment of status. We return here to the question of zhiguai’s potential as a ‘minor literature’, and its power to provocatively trouble normativity, not just through depiction but through affect.