Hello, My Concubine [So-Called Trends]
by Guest Contributor Jen, originally published at Disgrasian
British newspaper The Independent reported last week that concubines are making a comecuback in China due to the return of capitalism. This is particularly fascinating to me because my great-great-grandmother was a concubine. She was the only “wife” of my great-great-grandfather able to give him a son–my maternal grandmother’s father–which was considered the socially-acceptable reason to take on a concubine in those days (as opposed to just keeping them around for sex).
But as I read the Independent piece, “Chinese Concubines Return Thanks To Increasing Capitalism,” which cited one corrupt government official after another keeping mistresses and sometimes offering those women kickbacks, I began to wonder what the difference was between a concubine and a mistress. Was it only semantics? Or was there some kind of legal difference?
As it turns out, concubinage has always been differentiated from having a mistress because of its legal status. According to the Reference.com encyclopedia:
Concubines have limited rights of support from the man, and their offspring are publicly acknowledged as the man’s children, albeit of lower status than children born by the official wife or wives; these legal rights distinguish a concubine from a mistress.
Since having concubines has been illegal in China since the founding of the Republic in 1912, why are these modern-day Chinese mistresses being called “concubines”? Why is The Independent insisting that China’s bringing back this “feudal institution”?
Oh right. Because we’re talking about China. Exotic, mysterious, fetish-y, weird, sexually perverse China. Land of half-a-billion sideways vaginas. Got it.
[via HuffPo]
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist wrote:
I knew right from the start, that it was a bullshit article with the whole “exotic Asian female mystique” bullshit… Today, there ain’t no such thing as “concubines.” Prostitutes are prostiutes, period.
Posted 04 Sep 2009 at 10:30 am ¶
GüeraLola wrote:
or mistresses for that matter. But really having a concubine is a matrimonially-oriented relationship with a man that cannot be married to her, often because of a difference in social status. So technically it is like having a second wife but . I believe also you had to support her and her children too. I highly doubt the Government wants that happening. So really with the rise of mistresses not concubines. As my teacher told me a concubine is not a “women who you have on the side.” Thank god, I found this blog.
Posted 04 Sep 2009 at 4:23 pm ¶
Zahra wrote:
I can’t comment on the Chinese version of concubinage, although I’d really love to hear from someone with language expertise. The piece above makes me wonder if contemporary Chinese are using an old term in a new way (language evolves! duh), but Western media is using an outdated translation to exotify.
But concubinage has a long and inglorious history in Europe: the hetaeira in ancient Greece and qiyan in medieval Iberia & France (all of whom were slaves), and “courtesans” in Italy and France at later dates. Despite recent attempts to romanticize & artificially inflate these women’s lives, theirs was generally not an enviable position, especially when it comes to consent.
I’d also mention the placee systems of 19th c New Orleans in the US, in which white colonial men contracted long-term written relationships with black-white “mixed-race” women alongside their marriage to white women.
So any attempt to paint concubinage as an “Eastern” institution is just…perverse.
Posted 04 Sep 2009 at 4:29 pm ¶
Lai wrote:
It doesn’t help much that in Chinese these mistresses are referred to as 二奶 — second wife — which reflects the old polygamist society. Any Chinese person could tell you that the word has a polygamist past but that now it is very, very, very much easily translated to a mistress or lover if you’re at any way familiar with how modern Chinese society works. However if you’re some dumbass editor without any/much China experience (which many of those editing these stories are), it is potentially easy to mistake as “concubine” (妾/姬). Of course, a simple search into whether concubinage is legal, etc. in the PRC would show one that they are not and that the word is thus inappropriate.
Posted 05 Sep 2009 at 4:50 am ¶
TN wrote:
Land of half-a-billion sideways vaginas.
that would be so funny… if there weren’t people who actually believe it’s true *smh*
Posted 05 Sep 2009 at 6:07 am ¶
TN wrote:
I am surprised that there’s not many comments here, a topic that discusses both sexism and racism and there’s just silence?
That said, thank you Jen for this post.
Posted 08 Sep 2009 at 9:22 pm ¶
submom wrote:
Nice play on Farewell, My Concubine. LOL. If they don’t use this word, Concubine, they won’t be able to use any exotic images that will help increase readership. Mistresses are so bourgeois. Also a universal phenom. (”Yawn. Big deal. So they have mistresses now. Who doesn’t?”) Hmm. Come to think of it, they should have used the word Mistress in order to make the point that China is picking up the bourgeois vice. So going back to my original point, they sell out to sell paper. Now, who’s the whore here?! One more rant: who’s the genius at AP that selected the photo to accompany the story as seen on HuffPost? Hello? Chinese opera performer. Not concubine. Thespians get no respect anywhere in this world…
Posted 10 Sep 2009 at 5:50 am ¶
d wrote:
“able to give him a son” lolz, its men who determine the sex of the baby. I have many an uncle back in Nigeria who think like this, I think doctors need to start giving talks
Posted 13 Sep 2009 at 9:53 am ¶