Female Suicide,Subjectivity and the State in Eighteenth‐Century China

This article examines the social and political significance of female suicide in Qing Dynasty China and its implications for women's agency, feminine subjectivity and the state's interpretation of violence. Tracing the development of state and elite interpretations of the propriety of women's suicides, it situates the discourse on female suicide in the context of state efforts to control the definition and enactment of moralised violence and pervasive rhetoric about women's incapacity for moral agency. Demonstrating the problematic ethical and judicial status of suicides committed in the wake of a violation of chastity, in particular, it argues that such suicides represented a distinctively female definition of moral order and the role of violence within it.