This seminar explores how women experienced and shaped China's transition from the early modern to the modern. What did it mean to be a woman with bound feet in the commercializing late Ming empire? How did class, ethnicity, and status shape a woman's experience in the multi-ethnic Qing empire? How did a woman negotiate questions and demands of modernity and revolution on their gender roles, bodies, and sexualities? How did Qing, Republican, and Communist regimes manage gender norms, sexualities, and deviances? How does a woman exercise agency in a patriarchal system? Students will read, discuss, and write about material (in translation) by women and about women such as novels, films, letters, and poetry.
- Profesor: Clark Alejandrino