Desire and same-sex intimacies in Asia

Very much a product of the 19th-century Western imagination, the term 'homosexuality' has little cultural resonance in Asian societies where (before widespread Western influence) same-sex love did not attract the same degree of culturally conditioned or socially sanctioned scorn that it did in Christian Europe. 'Asia' comprises a huge area and a multiplicity of cultures and traditions. This chapter will confine itself to the three most influential cultural traditions in Asia: those of China, Japan and India. An exploration of political treatises, military histories, philosophical tracts, artistic representations and poetic works will reveal that ideas of love, romance, friendship, virtue and chivalry combined with expressions of homosexuality in different ways, but that they always formed an integral part of the way in which notions of masculinity and femininity were articulated and understood in prevailing religious traditions.