This dissertation looks at the figure of the eunuch in the Mingshi , the official history of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), to see how it was explained and used in that historical text. Through the analysis of the biographies of infamous eunuchs such as Wei Zhongxian (1568–1627) and Liu Jin (d. 1510), as well as those of lesser eunuchs and collaborators, it is shown that the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) historians understood the eunuch's castration to result in his divorce from familial and cultural forms of affiliation and identity. The eunuch's resulting exile from the affiliative order manifests itself not just in the violation of Confucian norms of filial piety and loyalty, but also in a specific form of corporality characterized, and perhaps produced, by the eunuch's freedom from the structuring containment of affiliative identity.; This unbridled corporality and release from the restrictions of patriarchal affiliation is confined and manipulated by the historian. Confinement is enacted in the casting of the eunuch as a sterile usurper bringing chaos to the state, yet unable to escape the detached, judgmental gaze of the historian. The historian uses him to police the boundaries of legitimate membership in the class of shi, or literati-officials, by discovering, through contact with him, a similar disaffiliation among his non-eunuch allies. The inflexibility of the judgment against the eunuch and his faction facilitates the Confucian historian in drafting of judgments On such incidents as the Yongle usurpation (1402), the Tumu incident (1449), the Great Rites Controversy of the Jiajing reign (1522–66), and the factional disputes of the Wanli period (1573–1620).; However, the eunuch also exceeds his allotted role and questions the constructions and legitimacy of shi affiliation both by parodying those structures of identity and by acting out the unspeakable pleasures of disaffiliation. In doing so, the eunuch deconstructs the notion of legitimate affiliation while revealing the role of desire in the historian's own retrospective/reconstructive gaze over the history he records and identity he wishes to manufacture.
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