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Precarious peripheries
Gender from the Margins of China
What and where are these margins and what role does gender play in their construction and imagination? In what ways does gender condition their experience of the peripheral spaces in which they operate?
BOND Jennifer, JORTAY Coralie et CHANG Liu (dir.), Precarious peripheries, Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, juin 2022, 147 p.
In recent years, academic attention has widened its scope to new margins including environmental histories of China’s politically contested borders, and the projection of China’s soft power in contemporary science fiction that claims space as the newest frontier of the Sinosphere. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of gender in imagining and creating China’s shifting centers and peripheries.
What and where are these margins and what role does gender play in their construction and imagination? Who are the inhabitants of the margins: minorities, women, religious groups, itinerants, disabled people and the poor? In what ways does gender condition their experience of the peripheral spaces in which they operate? What are the social and gendered implications of traversing these boundaries – personal, political or physical? How do marginal actors negotiate their place at the borders and what is the impact of their positioning and perspectives on the very conception of Chineseness? A gendered perspective can better help scholars to transverse and dissect the borders of China, historically, socially, politically and geographically, and throw new light onto their fluid and permeable construction across time and space.
Jennifer BOND is a Lecturer in Education at University College London. She is a historian of Modern China and her research interests span the fields of Chinese History, Gender Studies, Education, Religion and history of diplomacy. Jennifer is currently working on a book manuscript which explores the identity negotiations of girls who attended missionary schools in early twentieth century East China.
Coraline JORTAY has received her PhD from the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Brussels, Belgium). Her research focuses on the literary debates following the “invention” of gendered pronouns in Chinese, and more generally on pronominal re-appropriations in twentieth and twenty-first century Sinophone literature. She is currently a Laming Junior Research Fellow at the Queen’s College, University of Oxford.
Chang LIU is a Lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen). Her ongoing book manuscript investigates the changing cultural-political discourses about single womanhood in the first half twentieth century China and the everyday lives of actual middle-class single women in urban areas, with a focus on Shanghai.