Call for papers: re-envisioning gender in China
How do we re-envision gender in China? Conversely, how does gender allow us to re-envision China? Following feminist theorist bell hooks’ impetus that ‘There is power in looking’, and that probing ‘a critical gaze, one that “looks” to document, one that is oppositional’, the second conference of the China Academic Network on Gender (CHANGE) seeks to examine what new dynamics and power relations are transmitted, focused, defocused or blurred when gender is used as the prism to examine Chinese society and cultural practices.
Interdisciplinary at heart, the conference looks to articulate issues of gender in representation and spectatorship in the humanities and social sciences. What do such analyses reveal about the assumptions and narratives of voyeurism, gender-blindness, or masculine/feminine gazes? How are minorities (including sexual minorities) looked through or looked down upon? How do feminist and queer filmmakers seize gender as a lens in the literal sense? What about deliberate blurring practices of gender boundaries? How does re-envisioning gender allow us to look ‘against the grain’ at canonical texts, or to explore transgressive representations beyond ‘Chineseness’ and gender binaries?