The history of the famous Chinese women who controlled power in the late seventh and early eighth centuries—the “empress” Wu Zhao, the Taiping princess, and the Anle princess, among others—has long been vexed by the surviving sources. These sources are scanty, biased toward the ruling Li clan of the Tang, often based on rumor and gossip, and scathingly critical of the women’s conduct, morals, and access to power. In Transgressive Typologies, Doran adopts a new, interdisciplinary approach to understanding Tang and Song accounts of these women, which is typologies read across a wide range of literary and historical texts to delineate typologies behind their representations. Overall, the book persuasively demonstrates the existence of these gender typologies in the texts, and it provides a sophisticated model for analyzing accounts of medieval Chinese women.
In sidestepping the unproductive (because unsolvable) question of which accounts are more or less true, Doran’s approach often...