Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains

By Tucker Lieberman

Monstrous: physically, mentally, morally. Castrated men are often portrayed this way in fiction. What's the "evil eunuch" stereotype, and why do novelists reproduce it?

In Pai

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glyph Torrent
• Release date: Oct 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732906006

Tucker Lieberman

Tucker Lieberman-haunted by his acquaintance with the late author of "Eunuchry"-wrote the ghost story "Exit Interview" for DefCon One's "imaginary friends" fiction anthology, "I Didn't Break the Lamp." At Brown University, he received the Casey Shearer Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction and a bachelor's degree in philosophy. He earned a postgraduate degree in journalism from Boston University. Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, he lives with the science fiction writer Arturo Serrano in Bogotá, Colombia. He is turning forty.

Book preview

Painting Dragons:

What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains

by Tucker Lieberman

Bogotá, Colombia

Glyph Torrent

2018

Copyright

Introduction: What Color Is Your Dragon?

Chapter 1: A European Tradition of Stereotypes

Chapter 2: Anxieties in Imperial China

Chapter 3: Representations of Persia

Chapter 4: Seekers of Revenge

Chapter 5: Sociopath, Vampire, Demon

Chapter 6: Meanings in Modern Empire

Chapter 7: Not Evil Enough

Conclusion: Mirroring Magic

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Bibliography

Copyright

Copyright © 2018 by Glyph Torrent (Bogotá, Colombia)

Cover art and design by Andi Santagata.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First publication of eBook: October 2018

[About the Author was amended in 2020.]

ISBN-13: 978-1-7329060-0-6

Introduction: What Color Is Your Dragon?

You’re writing a story. One of your characters is a villain, and you’re thinking of adding that he is a eunuch—that is, a castrated man. Or maybe it’s the other way around: one of your characters is a eunuch, and you’re thinking of adding that he is a villain. This color combination seems intriguing. It may yield an appealing story, and such a narrative may help readers comprehend themes like trauma and evil. The metaphor of castration may allow readers to explore topics that are emotionally intense and shrouded in shame. Why not go there?

Here’s one reason you may want to hold back: The eunuch villain is an established trope. Castrated men have been typecast in novels as thoroughly evil: scheming, vengeful, indifferent to others’ feelings. Any eunuch character, simply by being marked as a eunuch, can trigger this stereotype in the reader’s imagination. He’s a recognizable color in the artistic sense (as well as likely also drawing on some assumptions about race). His existence in your story will prompt readers to ask whether he’ll turn out to fit the mold and why it is worth taking interest in him.

Before you decide how to write your character, it would be good to look at other stories where such characters have been done before. That’s what this book, Painting Dragons, does. This is a deep dive into the stereotype of the evil eunuch in fiction.

I’m going to point out characters in fiction, their most salient traits, the common threads that join them, and what they mean from my perspective today. They might mean something very different to you. It will be an interesting experiment to keep not just an open mind about what really might exist (past, present, and future) but an open imagination about what those things could mean and how they could be portrayed artistically. By uncovering personalities that have already been written, you, as a writer, can make more informed choices about how to create new characters.

Why I Began Reading About Eunuchs

I am a transgender man, by which I mean that I was born female and decided to change my body and live as a man. My experience of masculinity is thus different from the norm. I was socialized as a girl, and my body is in some ways dissimilar from other men’s bodies.

If people do not know this about me, they may wonder why I may seem a little different from other men. If, on the other hand, they are aware of my gender history, they may have some expectations about how a transgender man should behave, and I might not meet those expectations. This is a general truism about how stereotypes operate: they are always in our minds, whether or not we are conscious of them, whether or not they are based on fact, and whether or not it makes sense to apply them.

I happen to have given a bit of thought to my own gender and to the way in which I live inside and outside certain molds. Because of that, I am positioned to empathize with eunuch characters in fiction, at least to the extent possible given that I am not one. When a novelist points out a character’s gender as eunuch, it is typically because that gender yields some conflict, challenge, special treatment, or strategic advantage or disadvantage within the story. I have a personal frame of reference for understanding some of those themes. I have the perspective of someone who has experienced a gender transformation of my own and who is consequently part of a marginalized gender minority.

I am not, however, a eunuch, and it is important that I say so as I write this book. I have deeply invested myself in an eclectic reading list of fiction and nonfiction in which eunuchs are represented, but I am not (neither by physical embodiment nor by some other claim to identity) exactly the type of person who is being represented in those stories.

Why did I begin reading fiction about eunuchs and not about transgender men? In part, it was due to my timing. I transitioned to a new gender as a teenager in the late ’90s when there were fewer books about transgender identity and they were difficult to find. While I knew of a few nonfiction titles (clinical, political, memoir), I yearned for the kind of truths that are more commonly and more powerfully conveyed through narrative. I hadn’t yet been exposed to many strong, mythic interpretations of gender-crossing people, certainly not as many as I personally wanted and needed, and I hadn’t yet lived long enough to give them the complex interpretations that would make them relevant to me. I didn’t have stories or language with which to interpret myself and the specific way in which I felt different.

I didn’t expect to find any stories about transgender men in fiction, and, since I did not look for them, I did not find them. What I found, instead, were eunuchs, and they immediately captured my attention.

In college, I found a handful of such books, mostly by Western authors, on the library shelf. Initially, I encountered these characters primarily as harem guards in the Ottoman and Chinese empires, devotees to non-Christian gods, early Christian heretical monks, and Italian soprano singers. These are the ways they are most frequently known in the popular consciousness, at least in the books to which I had access.

Something about these descriptions appealed to me: sadness, hopelessness, unrelenting otherization. That was the way I understood myself at the time. I, too, presented as a man but, to my chagrin, I did not have a standard set of male genitalia. I had chosen to become infertile, which pleased me, but I was also aware of how infertility placed me outside what was often considered a normal or typical life plan. I had chosen this path, and the world would always see me as other.

Eunuchs like the ones in my reading material really existed in the Roman, Chinese, and Persian empires. The reasons for their castrations, however, had begun to vanish into history, as had the social understanding that they belonged to a separate gender. Sun Yaoting, the last survivor of those eunuchs who served imperial China, died in 1996, just a couple years before I began to comb the library bookshelves at my university. Eunuchs were already socially extinct, or nearly so. That isn’t to say that castration doesn’t happen today, but it is to say that it typically happens in different ways, for different reasons, and that it is understood differently. There is not a eunuch gender role in exactly the way there used to be; it isn’t common and it isn’t obvious.

In the real world, as a human rights matter, this change is undoubtedly for the better. The end of slave systems that required castration means that boys are less likely to be mutilated in medically unsanitary, emotionally traumatic conditions and that adult men in desperate straits do not feel forced to submit to castration as a solution to their career problems. The end of widespread social endorsement of the idea of a eunuch slave is part of overall historical narratives about the abolition of slavery.

I hold this moral opinion about actual abuse, but, when I approached literature with a private agenda to interpret my gender, I had mixed feelings about the end of the widespread social understanding of eunuch. The disappearance of collective awareness that eunuchs ever existed seemed to imply a diminished awareness of the history of masculinity.

The 20th century saw eunuch identity fall into obscurity just as transgender identity was rising. The existing fiction about eunuch characters was becoming less obvious in its original meaning and less relevant to modern life, and fiction about transgender characters hadn’t yet fully emerged. I was part of a new medical and psychological category of people whose stories weren’t yet interpreted on library shelves.

Although science fiction and fantasy have always been replete with gender-bending experiences, I didn’t begin with that literature. Either I couldn’t easily find it or, perhaps because its universes were wholly imaginary, I didn’t perceive it as describing my life or speaking to me. The characters I personally gravitated to, then, were eunuchs. To me, they seemed anchored in the real world such that they might guard clues about my own identity and purpose, yet also vanished from the real world such that I could permit myself the freedom to interpret them as symbols.

This was helpful, as it cleared a path to do my own imaginative inner work. There were several reasons for this.

First, since the eunuch gender category had mostly passed into history, I could view fictional eunuchs in some private metaphorical capacity without risking stepping on the physical toes of anyone I might meet on the street. I could use these characters imaginatively because they were about as distant as possible from real, living people. I didn’t fear that I would offend others.

Second, if eunuchs were villainized or behaved in a disappointing manner, that characterization didn’t step on my toes. I wasn’t forced to read it as a direct commentary on or indictment of my own gender. I might feel a bit uncomfortable with the way characters were handled, but I didn’t have to feel pained or enraged. I could step back and entertain mere curiosity about how the story might be indirectly relevant to me. This was a side benefit of not having many directly relevant stories about my actual gender. Some men prefer to read stories about men, some women prefer to read stories about women, and I—since I couldn’t easily find representations of transgender men—had to learn to tolerate and benefit from more extended metaphors. I learned to identify with characters who seemed externally different from myself but with whom I shared some core motivation or perspective on a particular question.

Third, since it wasn’t obvious that anyone alive today (in my own group or any other group) would be directly hurt by characterizations of eunuchs, I didn’t feel an ethical responsibility to answer malign characterizations with immediate political action. I could think about the writer’s intent and the result, but I didn’t have to know the answer. Eunuch characters made fiction seem, to me, more of a playground than a political arena. It was a test space for ideas about gender where I could passively observe and explore my own intuitions without having to argue.

But it was also frustrating, because first-person eunuch narratives weren’t often preserved and these people no longer existed to tell their stories of bygone times. I could never fully map their stories onto my own life story, nor my life onto theirs. (This challenge is perhaps faced more generally by readers of historical fiction.) Reading eunuch characters made me feel as if they reflected me, but only vaguely. I felt as if I were seen, but only in an abstract way, perhaps as a mythological being, not as a real person on the ground. I had a place in story but not necessarily in public life.

Therefore, no matter how much of this material I read or contemplated, I never felt better. I learned more about how themes and images functioned within literature, but I never learned exactly what eunuch characters could do for me or exactly why I was drawn to them. The existence of these characters acknowledged problems of gender and sexuality, but their disappearance from the real world meant that the questions they’d raised remained unresolved. I rarely felt I had tools to interpret the