On Tuesday, 7 July 2026, from 16:15 in ZO 120.01.10 Eileen Yiran Zhao, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, will present a ChinaComx Guest Lecture titled “When Women’s Feelings Become Illness: Medicine, Gender, and the Boundaries of Sickness in Ming-qing China”.
Abstract for the talk:
What marks the boundary between an ordinary feeling and an illness caused by feeling? In classical Chinese medicine, emotions were not understood as purely mental states. They moved qi, affected the organs, and could become visible in the body through knots, depletion, bleeding, discharge, insomnia, pain, and wasting. Yet this boundary between feeling and illness was not drawn evenly across all bodies. In late imperial medical writing, women’s emotions were especially likely to be read through the reproductive body: blood, menstruation, leukorrhea, breast disorders, postpartum conditions, and liver-spleen constraint.
This talk explores how women’s feelings became medically legible in Ming-Qing China. It begins with earlier medical formulations of emotion, qi, and the organs, and then turns to gynecological writings and medical case narratives in which worry, anger, longing, jealousy, sexual frustration, and constraint were described as causes of bodily disorder. These texts did not simply claim that women were “more emotional.” Rather, they produced a gendered threshold between feeling and sickness by linking women’s social dependence, domestic confinement, sexual vulnerability, and moral responsibility to bodily pathology.
This talk will also briefly discuses examples from The Plum in the Golden Vase and The Story of the Stone show how literary narratives both echoed and unsettled medical ways of knowing women’s affective bodies. By moving between medical and literary materials, the talk asks how illness became a site where medicine, gender norms, and moral imagination together shaped the meaning of female emotion in late imperial China.
We are looking forward to the talk and to seeing you there!