Goddess on the Frontier: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bryson, Megan, author.

Title: Goddess on the frontier : religion, ethnicity, and gender in southwest China / Megan Bryson.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016012719| ISBN 9780804799546 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503600454 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Baijie (Buddhist deity)—Cult—History. | Buddhist goddesses—China—Dali Baizu Zizhizhou—History. | Buddhism—China—Dali Baizu Zizhizhou—History. | Ethnicity—Religious aspects—Buddhism. | Bai (Chinese people)—Religion. | Dali Baizu Zizhizhou (China)—Religion.

Classification: LCC BQ4890.B352 B78 2016 | DDC 299.5/112114—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012719

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion Pro

GODDESS ON THE FRONTIER

Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Southwest China

MEGAN BRYSON

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

For my parents, Randy Bryson and Julie Culbertson.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Dali

1. Baijie’s Background: Religion and Representation in the Nanzhao and Dali Kingdoms

2. Holy Consort White Sister: Baijie Shengfei and Dali Buddhism

3. Little White Sister: Baijie Amei, Dragons, and Kingship in Ming Dali

4. Lady of Cypress Chastity: Baijie Furen in the Ming and Qing

5. Baijie the Benzhu: Village Religion in Contemporary Dali

Conclusion: Ethnicity and Gender in the Cult of the Goddess Baijie

List of Chinese Characters

List of Abbreviations

Notes

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Map I.1. Current PRC

Map I.2. Modern Yunnan Province

Map 1.1. Nanzhao kingdom

Map 1.2. Dali kingdom

Map 1.3. Dali kingdom Buddhist sites

Map 5.1. Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture

Figure 1.1. Chan lineage, Fanxiang juan

Figure 2.1. Mahākāla and Fude Longnü, Fanxiang juan

Figure 2.2. Yakṣa God of Great Joy and Kāla of the Golden Bowl, Fanxiang juan

Figure 3.1. Baijie Amei, Linghui si

Figure 4.1. Baijie Furen and Husband, City of Virtue’s Source

Figure 5.1. Baijie statue, Deer Town

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As this project has taken shape over the past decade, many individuals and institutions have offered support of various kinds throughout its different stages. During the year I spent in Dali in 2007–2008, the staff of the Dali xueyuan Ethnic Culture Research Center helped me plan and carry out fieldwork as well as textual studies. I am grateful to Cun Yunji, Yang Hongbin, Wang Wei, Na Zhangyuan, and Zhang Xilu for their hospitality and guidance, especially in the field. Yang Xiongduan in particular was a dear friend and research partner whose family welcomed me with open arms and delicious food. Without her help, conducting this research would have been far less fruitful and interesting. I would also like to thank Zhao Yinsong, Tian Huaiqing, and Li Gong at the Bai Culture Research Center for being so generous with their time and resources. I owe a big debt of gratitude to Hou Chong for having paved the way for this project with his excellent work on Buddhism in Dali. Hou Chong has also shown unfailing kindness and generosity in assisting with difficult manuscripts and sharing sources. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have benefited from his wisdom and compassion.

After returning to Stanford following my time in Dali, I continued to develop this project in conversation with other students and professors. I’d like to thank the wonderful members of my cohort who read and commented on earlier versions of this project, especially Ben Brose, Se-Woong Koo, and Zhaohua Yang. Dominic Steavu, Brenda Falk, Chiew-hui Ho, and Jason Protass were also excellent conversation partners during this period. Of course, I am deeply grateful to Carl Bielefeldt and Bernard Faure for their guidance, as well as for giving me the freedom to pursue this project. Bernard’s work on deities has been an inspiration for my own work, and I am particularly thankful to him for steering me in this direction. At the end of my time at Stanford, I had the opportunity to work with other mentors whose feedback helped to improve this project. Comments from Wendi Adamek, Paul Harrison, and Matt Sommer helped tremendously as I revised the book. John McRae deserves special mention for providing insightful comments on early chapters and for taking time to discuss Buddhism in Dali with me; I wish he were here to see the book in print.

At the University of Tennessee my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies have provided consistent support and helpful feedback as I turned the project into a book manuscript. I’d like to thank Rosalind Hackett, Rachelle Scott, Gilya Schmidt, Erin Darby, Mark Hulsether, Tina Shepardson, and Kelly Baker. Tina and Kelly in particular provided invaluable camaraderie and empathy during the long revision process. Colleagues in the faculty research seminar on Centers and Peripheries in East Asia also offered constructive comments on parts of this book, so many thanks are due to Noriko Horiguchi, Charles Sanft, Suzanne Wright, and Shellen Wu. I am also grateful to my wonderful students at the University of Tennessee, whose insightful comments and questions have helped me think about how to translate my research for a broader audience. Special thanks are due to Jenny Gavacs, Anne Fuzellier Jain, and everyone else I’ve had the pleasure to work with at Stanford University Press. Their feedback and guidance have made this a truly enjoyable process.

Finally, and most important, are the people who have supported me throughout this revision process and in life in general. My parents, Randy Bryson and Julie Culbertson, have always been there for me as I moved to China and back and then around the United States as part of the itinerant academic lifestyle. I have been truly fortunate to have such a supportive family, including my brother Will, who has been a great sounding board as we each embarked on our careers. I’d like to end by thanking Dan Magilow for reading and commenting on parts of this book and for the encouragement, love, and support that helped me keep going with this project through difficult times.

INTRODUCTION

Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in Dali

AUGUST 14, 2009, marked the beginning of the Torch Festival, and on that day a huge crowd gathered on the hilltop of the City of Virtue’s Source to celebrate the grand opening of the new temple to Baijie Shengfei (Holy Consort of White Purity).¹ A red banner hanging across the temple doors read, Ceremony Celebrating Eryuan County’s Renovation of the Holy Consort of White Purity Temple. To the west of the temple, celebrants circumambulated a giant torch that would be ignited at sundown. Festooned with colorful streamers, flags, and pom-poms, the torch bore its own messages of celebration: red banners exhorted the crowd to joyfully observe the ethnic Torch Festival and proclaimed that the torch was erected by the Eryuan County People’s Government. Dance troupes wearing brightly colored costumes performed routines while waiting for the official ceremony to begin.

Everyone on the hilltop that day would have recognized Baijie as an eighth-century widow martyr who committed suicide rather than marry the man who killed her husband. According to Baijie’s legend, her husband ruled a small kingdom that had its capital in the City of Virtue’s Source. His fiery death at the hands of a rival ruler was the origin story for the Torch Festival. The celebrants interpreted Baijie’s title Holy Consort as a reference to her relationship with her husband. However, it originally referred to Baijie’s relationship to someone else: the wrathful god Mahākāla. In the earliest writings on Baijie Shengfei, from the twelfth century, she was not a widow martyr at all but a Buddhist dragon maiden. This book tells her story.

The Goddesses Called Baijie

Baijie Shengfei first appeared in Buddhist ritual texts and art of the Dali kingdom (937–1253) as the consort of Mahākāla, a form of the Indian god Śiva converted to protect the Buddhist teachings. By the fifteenth century, the name Baijie also referred to the mother of Duan Siping, founder of the Dali kingdom. According to her legend, she conceived the future ruler when a dragon disguised as a piece of wood floated into her foot while she bathed. This Baijie was enshrined in temples near the ancestral home of the Dali kingdom’s founder. The eighth-century widow martyr only came to be called Baijie during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). She, too, was enshrined in temples and worshipped as a goddess and moral exemplar. Today the Baijie revered as a tutelary village deity (known as benzhu in Dali) contains elements of all three of these forms.

The name Baijie was initially written differently for the different figures that bore it: the Buddhist Baijie Shengfei means Holy Consort White Sister; Duan Siping’s mother was Baijie Amei, Little White Sister; and the widow martyr was known as Baijie Furen, Lady Cypress Chastity. As the three figures became intertwined, their names were also combined, and so today one commonly finds the name of the Buddhist Baijie attached to a figure identified as the widow martyr by villagers. I refer to these three figures collectively as Baijie because of the historical continuities between them and their eventual commingling. Despite the differences in names and forms, two elements of Baijie’s identity remain consistent: she always appears as a feminine figure, and she only appears in the Dali region of southwest China’s Yunnan Province.

Dali is a frontier zone where different cultures meet. Though now part of the People’s Republic of China, Dali has long bordered Southeast Asia, India, and Tibetan regions. From the seventh to thirteenth centuries it was the capital of two independent kingdoms, Nanzhao (649–903) and Dali, and after the Mongol conquest of 1253 it was claimed by the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties centered in Beijing. Dali offers a case study of how people craft local identities out of multiple possibilities and how these local identities transform over time.

Baijie’s transformations from the twelfth century to the present have echoed and shaped Dali’s local identity and how it has been gendered. As Dali changed from an independent political center to a peripheral region in a vast empire, Baijie similarly changed from a dragon maiden and consort of Mahākāla called Baijie Shengfei to a chaste widow martyr known as Baijie Furen. The dynamic aspects of Baijie’s identity mirrored the dynamism of local identity. Baijie, like her worshippers, could not be reduced to either her local or her gendered identity: like them, her identity changed in connection with the broader context; and like them, her local identity did not emerge in a vacuum—it developed through encounters between local and translocal forces.

Translocal forces entered Dali from multiple directions, but Dali elites did not draw equally from each source.² Baijie’s transformations primarily show how Dali elites represented gendered local identity in relation to Chinese culture and the Chinese state, which even before the Mongol conquest of 1253 constituted the main translocal presence in the region. However, Dali’s location in a frontier zone (also known as Zomia) meant that its elites could draw on a broad repertoire of gendered symbols when positioning themselves in relation to China. Baijie survived because she allowed Dali elites to invoke local identity while maintaining an image of feminine propriety that signified civilization in the semiotic system of Chineseness.

MAP I.1. Current PRC

MAP I.2. Modern Yunnan Province

Deities and Society

Doing justice to Baijie’s identities requires examining closely the complex connections between divine symbols and social roles. Baijie’s transformations are tied to changes in gendered local identities in Dali, but Baijie does not just mirror her worshippers. Scholars of religion in China have long observed the correlations between human society and the spirit world (especially their bureaucratic character), but as Meir Shahar and Robert Weller note, the Chinese supernatural is neither a mere tool of China’s political system nor a simple reification of its social hierarchy.³ Deities lack single, fixed identities. They do not have to be either constructive or destructive; they can be (and usually are) both. As polysemic symbols, deities still relate to human society, but not as one-to-one reflections.

Deities’ complex roles are especially important to recognize with respect to gender. Gender is a common focus in studies of goddesses, and for good reason: when sources by and about women are scarce, goddesses can provide an entry point for discussions of femininity and gendered symbolism. As Caroline Walker Bynum observes, divine symbols emerge from the experiences of gendered subjects and are therefore themselves gendered in some way, even if not explicitly.⁴ However, Bynum also notes that the connection between gender and religious symbols is not straightforward: Gender-related symbols, in their full complexity, may refer to gender in ways that affirm or reverse it, support or question it; or they may, in their basic meaning, have little at all to do with male and female roles.⁵ Even though Baijie’s various identities correspond to some of women’s social roles—consort, mother, and widow—this does not mean that she merely reflects or reinforces those roles in Dali society. Baijie has been a dynamic symbol that people throughout Dali’s history have encountered and used in different ways.

GENDERED DEITIES

Goddesses are more than mirror images of women’s social roles, and they do more than either oppress or liberate women. Earlier studies of goddesses, fueled by Mary Daly’s criticisms of monotheistic religions centered around masculine deities, presented goddesses as empowering symbols that could establish gender equality.⁶ However, powerful female deities do not automatically give women economic, political, or social power. They can in fact reinforce patriarchal structures by embodying virtues tied to women’s subordination or by demarcating an unbridgeable gap between goddesses and women. Steven Sangren argues that the Chinese goddesses Guanyin, Birthless Eternal Mother (Wusheng laomu), and the Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu) embody an idealized version of femininity that is both maternal and chaste, something that cannot be achieved by women.⁷ Brigitte Baptandier similarly concludes in her study of the Chinese goddess Lady by the Water (Linshui furen) that women only enjoy equality with men in the symbolic imaginary, that is, as goddesses. While the Lady by the Water defies social convention by postponing marriage to pursue Daoist training, the women who worship her seek fertility to fulfill their wifely obligations.⁸

Understanding how goddesses relate to women’s social roles requires going beyond the binary of oppression and liberation. Instead, we must examine how gendered symbols operate in context, and how people encounter and manipulate these symbols in different ways. In Dali, Baijie’s widow martyr role signifies different gendered values in the Ming and Qing dynasties than in the PRC. Even during the Ming and Qing dynasties, outside officials presented this form of Baijie as proof that the barbarians of Dali could be civilized, while local intellectuals used her to claim that their ancestors had long embraced the feminine virtues that represented civilization. In the PRC she may symbolize women’s oppression under feudalism or inspire women with her refinement and virtue.

In the same vein, there is no single women’s experience of goddesses. Feminist theorists have argued for the need to address diversity in the category woman by considering gender alongside other forms of identity such as class, age, and ethnicity. Modern Western conceptions of gender, sex, sexuality, and women do not necessarily fit premodern periods and different cultures.⁹ Tani Barlow, for instance, challenges the idea that the category woman even existed in premodern China, noting that one’s role within the family was a more important identity than the idea of a shared womanhood uniting daughters, mothers-in-law, and maids.¹⁰ The use of the male-female (nannü) binary in premodern Dali justifies collectively labeling Baijie’s different roles as feminine, but it would be a mistake to elide the distinctions between consort, mother, and widow. Baijie’s female worshippers (as observed in contemporary Dali) likewise do not belong to an undifferentiated mass of women but align with other forms of identification, such as age, village, or religiosity.

Nor does gender only apply when considering the relationship between goddesses and women: masculine deities are gendered, and men worship goddesses, too. James L. Watson’s study of Mazu worship in Southeast China has shown that women speak of Mazu as a personal deity, while men (at least those from powerful lineages) speak of her as a symbol of territorial hegemony.¹¹ The category man, like woman, is not monolithic, and premodern sources about Baijie come from male elites with access to education and other resources, whether the rulers and court officials of the Dali kingdom or degree-holders of the Ming and Qing. These sources may not represent understandings or uses of gendered symbols in other parts of the Dali population, and they do not explain women’s social status in Dali. Nonetheless, the male elites whose work has survived did not create these gendered symbols anew; they encountered the symbols as part of a larger cultural framework that female elites (and other segments of the population) might have shared. Similarly, their authorial intentions do not dictate how people interpreted their texts. However, in the absence of additional sources on how other segments of the Dali population would have encountered and interpreted these depictions of Baijie, I limit my conclusions to the male elites that produced the materials and claimed to represent the kingdom, clan, or ethnic group.

LOCAL DEITIES

Baijie does not merely reflect her worshippers’ gendered worlds but is herself part of those worlds. Her devotees include diverse populations of men and women of different ages, time periods, education levels, and village affiliations who encounter and invoke Baijie in different ways. In addition to being a goddess, Baijie is also a local figure that has never been worshipped outside of Dali. Locality is a discourse of power that creates distinctions between what is rooted in a particular place and what is not, namely, the universal, unlocalizing, or utopian.¹² But while the local-universal binary has heuristic value, it inevitably masks more complex interactions between localizing and unlocalizing forces.¹³ Great goddesses develop local or regional identities, or become identified with local or regional deities, just as local goddesses are not cut off from outside influences. For example, Baijie’s cult may be more geographically restricted than Guanyin’s, but Guanyin has different local identities and Baijie’s different forms incorporate translocal elements.

In Dali, the dominant unlocalizing or universalizing discourses have been Buddhism and Chineseness, both of which manifest in Baijie’s different forms, starting with her earliest appearance as a Buddhist dragon maiden. Buddhist narrative encounters with localizing forces from India through East Asia often involve monks converting or controlling chthonic serpent deities. As Richard Cohen and Bernard Faure observe, Buddhists could only claim universality by emplacing themselves locally, thereby intertwining localizing and unlocalizing forces.¹⁴ Faure further draws attention to the gendered dimension of these encounters, in which the Buddhist monks signify masculine universality while the serpents signify feminine locality.¹⁵ This gendered encounter occurs in Dali through Baijie’s first role as a Buddhist dragon maiden, which binds the masculine, translocal god Mahākāla to the feminine, local goddess Baijie and mutually reinforces the local power of Buddhism and the universal power of local tradition.

Chineseness, the other universalizing discourse in Dali, exists in tension with two kinds of centrifugal forces, those of localization and of barbarism. Localization threatens the notion of a cohesive Chinese culture; scholars of religion have long discussed the relationship between universalizing and localizing forces, sometimes framing them as official versus popular or classical versus vernacular. Maurice Freedman and Arthur Wolf famously debated this issue, with Freedman arguing for a common Chinese religion and Wolf positing the irreducibility of local traditions.¹⁶ More recently, Prasenjit Duara’s notion of superscription, Paul Katz’s concept of reverberation, and Kenneth Dean’s syncretic field have offered ways to theorize how these two forces interrelate rather than arguing that one force simply dominates the other.¹⁷

Narratives, records, and practices associated with deities are ways in which people play out the relationship between universalizing forces of Chineseness and the localizing forces that challenge attempts at standardization. Local deities can disrupt universalizing claims of Chineseness by not fitting ideals of uniformity or standardization. State officials selectively proscribed cults devoted to such disruptive figures, including the Five Emperors in Southeast China and fox spirits in the North.¹⁸ Other local deities, such as Mazu and Wenchang, gained official approval when their worship was seen as supporting the state.¹⁹

Attempts to standardize deities could meet resistance from their devotees, who in some cases strategically relabeled or recast gods to conform to official prescriptions. Representatives of the state did not form a monolithic group, either, but might decide to allow or suppress local cults depending on local conditions, top-down pressure, or individual proclivities. Baijie’s roles as Duan Siping’s mother and as widow martyr were modes through which people in Dali—especially local elites and outside officials—promoted localizing or universalizing discourses. Officials presented Baijie as a moral exemplar whose veneration fit into universalizing Ming and Qing civilizing projects, but gazetteers show that people worshipped her as an efficacious goddess rooted in the region’s history.

These two poles of moral sagacity and spiritual efficacy fit Dean’s concept of the syncretic field, a multidimensional space created by the tension between two poles, which Dean defines as the universalizing, hierarchical, Confucian sheng sagehood at one end and the territorial, localized ling of spiritual efficacy at the other. Sheng forces try to incorporate ling forces within the hierarchy, but tension remains between these extremes.²⁰ A single deity’s cult will look different depending on one’s position within the syncretic field. Baijie can be simultaneously a paragon of wifely devotion and a goddess who ensures timely rainfall.

The syncretic field is a three-dimensional space created by intersecting planes. In Baijie’s case, the plane demarcated by universalizing and localizing forces intersects with the gendered plane demarcated by masculinity and femininity. Patterns govern how these two planes intersect: Chineseness, like Buddhism, contrasts its universalizing masculinity with localizing femininity. These discourses homologize masculine universality with texts, institutions, and hierarchies while homologizing feminine locality with oral traditions and looser sociopolitical organization. However, these homologies are part of the discourses, and it is important to attend to ways in which forms of social difference are neither analogous nor structurally similar.²¹ Even though Baijie remains a feminine figure in her different roles, her gendered symbolism can align with masculine universalizing discourses of Buddhist rulership, Confucian virtue, or (in the modern period) ethnicity. Alternatively, she can signify the feminine localizing forces characterized, in the manner of so-called little traditions, by their lack of names.

FRONTIER DEITIES

Dali’s position on the Chinese frontier means that its deities not only engage the tension between centripetal Chineseness and centrifugal locality, they also engage tensions between the universalizing discourses of Chineseness and barbarism. Like the binary of Chineseness and locality, the relationship between Chineseness and barbarism is gendered, but in ways that reflect the different dynamics linking these concepts. Whereas localizing discourses challenge the universality of Chineseness, the notion of barbarism reinforces Chineseness as a discrete and cohesive category by constituting the other against which it defines itself. In fact, barbarism is only the apparent opposite of Chineseness that conceals the latter’s true opposite, namely, localizing forces.

As forms of discourse, concepts of Chineseness and barbarism changed throughout history, covered broad semantic fields, and could be wielded strategically to support different positions. Chineseness, consistently denoted by hua, xia, or a compound thereof, arose during the Zhou dynasty as a label for the people and civilization of the Yellow River plain.²² Different groups received specific labels: the di in the north, yi in the east, man in the south, and rong in the west. Some of these became metonyms for uncultured barbarians in general.²³ Criteria for being Chinese were not fixed: for some, Chineseness depended on lineage, or what in modern discourse might be called race or ethnicity; for others, Chineseness could be acquired through mastery of a particular cultural repertoire, so that barbarians could become Chinese. These criteria were usually combined, but people could strategically foreground one or the other.

The goals of the Chinese state in standardizing temples and deities in both Chinese and barbarian regions were the same: to display state power and suppress potential resistance. However, the rhetoric differed, as Chinese expansion into so-called barbarian territories—including Dali, following the Ming conquest—involved what Stevan Harrell has called civilizing projects aimed at bringing Chinese culture to those regions.²⁴ C. Patterson Giersch notes that when the Qing empire expanded into southern Yunnan, the court promoted temples to city gods, the literary god Wenchang, and the martial god Guandi.²⁵ Settlers from Chinese regions also established native place associations and temples to their local deities, who then took on more universalizing roles as Chinese gods. Promoting Chinese gods and their temples did not entail eradicating local cults but initiated a divine takeover of the region to complement the military and political encroachments.

As with state policies toward local deities, official attitudes toward barbarian deities and their cults varied considerably depending on the place, the dominant political strategy of the day, and the position of the official in question. State officials might allow such cults to continue as part of a strategy of accommodation, assimilate these cults to those of Chinese deities, or suppress these cults as a show of power. For example, Qing officials in western Hunan developed new explanations of the Heavenly Kings, originally deities worshipped by the Miao people, that turned the gods into historical Han figures.²⁶ Representatives of the Ming and Qing courts attempted to standardize Baijie’s legends and her role as widow martyr to conform to Chinese models. Officials from outside Dali expressed astonishment that the widow martyr Baijie’s example could even survive in the land of barbarian mists and miasmic rain (manyan zhangyu).

Discourses of Chineseness and barbarism (like those of locality and universality) were not fixed but could be employed strategically. Most people were probably not concerned with whether deities were Chinese or barbarian but whether they were efficacious. Han settlers who started to worship the Miao Heavenly Kings in western Hunan likely would not have articulated their practices in terms of Chineseness or barbarism, just as people indigenous to Dali do not seem to have explicitly distinguished between Chinese and Bai deities. The selective use of these kinds of discourses continues to the present, when ethnic terminology is far more common among the educated, urban, and male than among the less educated, rural, and female.

The nineteenth century saw the rise of many new discourses in China, including those that frame this book, namely, gender, ethnicity, and religion. Ethnicity (minzu) superficially replaced the civilization-barbarism binary, which became a binary between the Han and minority nationalities. This new dyad reframed the civilized-barbarian divide in the model of sociohistorical evolution, in which the Han were seen as more advanced than ethnic minorities. Religion (zongjiao) found its opposites in superstition and science, which according to Prasenjit Duara constituted a more black-and-white binary than the previously dominant spectrum that ranged from correct (zheng) to perverse (xie) practices.²⁷ When combined, ethnicity and religion create reified categories of ethnic religion that assume the existence of distinctive ethnic practices, beliefs, and deities. In modern Dali, local scholars and government officials present Baijie as a goddess of the Bai ethnicity even though most of her worshippers do not use ethnic language to describe her.

Frontier deities such as Baijie illustrate how Chinese-barbarian and Han-minority binaries are gendered. Those claiming the Chinese position have long used perceptions of female sexuality to mark a given population’s level of civilization. Barbarian women tend to be seen as sexually uninhibited and promiscuous, as in the Tang dynasty claim that when Nanzhao women married, their secret lovers came to see the women off.²⁸ Xiaofei Kang’s study of fox spirits highlights the intersections of gender and Chineseness in showing how female foxes were associated with both dangerous sexuality and barbarism.²⁹ Within this semiotic system Baijie’s role as a widow martyr who refuses to remarry after her husband’s death signifies that the people of Dali are civilized, because women’s sexual propriety is a marker of civilization. In modern China the correlation between sexuality and barbarism continues, though within the discourses of gender and ethnicity. Minority women are also still perceived as sexually uninhibited, especially in the Southwest, as seen in depictions of promiscuity among Mosuo women and in the Yunnan school of painting that specializes in nude images of minority women.³⁰ People in modern Dali represent Baijie in ways that engage the semiotics of both gender and Bai ethnicity but in different ways, depending on their own positions in Dali society.

Baijie’s