Chinese people, like those of many other cultures, understand themselves as belonging to a specific gender, one with social rules and positions that can be difficult to stray from. Such gender norms have existed in China for millennia. There are a number of ways to examine what these gender norms are (or have been), and a number of ways in which one can understand how they dictated the lives of the Chinese people they defined.
The present thesis is a translation and study of two Chinese hagiographical collections from the late Song or early Yuan Dynasty. These collections detail the exploits of Daoist transcendents. The first collection translated is concerned with male transcendents, the second with female transcendents. In translating these texts, I seek to understand how gender is portrayed in the lives of exceptional religious figures. As an examination of gender within a patriarchal—or at least male-dominant—society, I expected the female transcendents to be relegated, somehow, to a lesser station.
Through my translations I argue that, though they could not wholly extricate themselves from gender norms, religious Daoism, as portrayed in the hagiographies, offered both men and women from certain social obligations. These social obligations include such institutions as marriage and reproduction (for both men and women). The hagiographies also depict a greater sense of equality for Daoist women than they might have found otherwise. At its most ambitious, Narrating Transcendents serves to demonstrate the multivalent function of hagiographies as tools religious communities used to define and guide themselves. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/16426 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Lovdahl, Nathaniel |
| Contributors | Benn, James A., Religious Studies |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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