University of Westminster Contemporary China Centre Seminar
'Sex and the Sinophone'
Dr Howard Chiang
Monday 19 May
6-8pm
Westminster Forum
University of Westminster
5th Floor
32/38 Wells Street
London W1T 3UW
This talk introduces Dr Chiang's current book-in-progress, which aims to accomplish three goals: it argues for the centrality of sexual scientific knowledge in modern China’s cultural formation; it highlights the role of the body as a catalyst in the mutual transformations of Chinese national modernity and the social significance of sex; and it establishes a genealogical relationship between the demise of eunuchism and the emergence of transsexuality in Chinese-speaking society. By provincializing China, this Sinophone genealogy of sex change maps the underexplored history of China’s modern “geobody” onto the more focused history of the biomedicalized human body.
Howard Chiang is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History at the University of Warwick. He is the editor of Transgender China (2012) and, with Ari Larissa Heinrich, Queer Sinophone Cultures (2013). He is currently completing a monograph on the historical and epistemological transformations of sex in twentieth-century China.
Non-University of Westminster attendees please register with Dr Derek Hird
[log in to unmask]
Contemporary China Centre: http://www.westminster.ac.uk/contemporary-china-centre
|