Jessey Choo (Rutgers University)

In medieval China, a seemingly misogynous but enduring and widespread belief held that all women were condemned to a special hell after death because their menses and blood from childbirth polluted all entities upon contact. Despite their offense being biological and involuntary, women faced the inescapable punishment of drinking from a pool of their own bloody discharge for all eternity. While the sources portray women's consignment to Blood Lake Hell as an inescapable fate, they also offer a wide range of rituals that promised escape. The lecture examines a particular group of Daoist rituals relate to the legends of virgin mothers and their sons. Highlighting the virgin birth and the mother-son bond, this soteriology removed the father from the picture, undermining the patrilineal principle that was the linchpin of the "Confucian" order and allowing women to claim an inalienable right to their children and carve out a space of their own where they were the sole objects of devotion.