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The Gender of the Operatic Voice from Li Yu (1611-1680) to Xu Dachun (1693-1771)
Society of Fellows in the Humanities | Department of Music | School of Chinese
The Gender of the Operatic Voice from Li Yu (1611-1680) to Xu Dachun (1693-1771)
Speaker: Judith T. Zeitlin
Department of East Asian Languages and Civilzations, University of Chicago
Date: 21 September 2026 (Mon)
Time: 5 PM (HKT)
Venue: Room 4.36, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
All are welcome! No registration required.
This lecture examines how engrained notions of gender difference were applied to the training of the operatic voice in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century elite discourse on Kunqu singing. As case studies, I focus on two important prescriptive, practical sources by Suzhou opera connoisseurs that explicitly discuss the gender of the singing voice: 1) Random Notes on Leisure Notes (Xianqing ouji 閒情偶寄), a manual of taste published in 1671, by the theatrical entrepreneur and playwright Li Yu 李漁,who had his own female troupe starring his own concubines, and 2) Transmitting the Operatic Voice (Yuefu chuansheng 樂府傳聲), published 1748, a technical treatise by the renowned physician Xu Dachun 徐大椿,written for the instruction of two singing boys he had purchased for his own household. Both men aspired to a broader applicability and circulation for their theories and methods. The lecture argues that major shifts in the operatic scene that occurred between the 1670s and 1740s partially account for the different rhetoric adopted by the two theorists as to what constitutes a “natural” gendered voice when it comes to singing as a man or a woman.
Judith Zeitlin is William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. Her work combines the literary history of Ming-Qing China with other disciplines, including visual and material culture, music, medicine, gender studies, and modern media. Her books include The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth Century Chinese Literature (2007), No Banquet without Music: Operatic Culture in Early Modern China (forthcoming) and co-edited volumes on writing and materiality, performing images, opera film, and voice.
Society of Fellows in the Humanities
Department of Music
School of Chinese
