When the Exotic Met the Erotic: The Representation of the Foreign in Ruyijun zhuan and “Jinhailing zongyu wangshen”

Abstract

Erotic fiction produced during the 16th and the early 17th centuries used different strategies to create settings for subversive sexual desires. This article examines one of these strategies: Authors of Ming erotic stories often associated the sexual expressions that challenged the existing social order with portrayals of the foreign. This article demonstrates that historical accounts and literary traditions informed the representations of the foreign in Ming erotic stories produced during the mid- and late Ming period through the examination of Ruyijun zhuan and “Jinhailing zongyu wangshen.” I argue that both narratives exoticized the erotic in order to exclude unsettling elements of sexual desire from China. However, due to their different views of sexual desire, they depicted the foreign differently. This paper concludes that the different strategies for appropriating sexual desire into foreign settings may be related to the historical contexts within which the two works of fiction were created.