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Feminism in China since The Women's Bill
Mid-June 2003
Shanghai, PRC
The Department of History at Fudan University, Shanghai, and the Center for Chinese Studies and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan will jointly host an international conference in Shanghai on "Feminism in China since The Women's Bill" in mid-June 2003, the centennial anniversary of the publication of The Women's Bill. Recent studies on modern China have paid increasing attention to gender in China's pursuit of modernity. Scholarship examining various ways that gender has been reconfigured, reconceived, and represented in China's political, cultural, social and economic transformations has contributed greatly to the development of the China field. Yet while gender has been frequently used by scholars outside China as a category of analysis, it has remained unfamiliar to academics in China, especially to Chinese historians. The conference aims at bridging the intellectual gap between China scholars in and outside China by engendering the historiography of modern China. Since Jin Tianhe published The Women's Bill in 1903, the century has witnessed the most conspicuous change in the realm of gender in China. "Women's rights," a prominent vision expressed in The Women's Bill, has been pursued, imagined, created, and practiced by generations of feminist activists. While a feminist discourse has long been blended in China's dominant political discourse, it has never received as much scholarly attention as Marxism, either in or outside China. This conference aims at enhancing academic awareness of the genealogy of feminism in China as well as promoting feminism as a legitimate discourse in contemporary society. We suggest the following topics for panels, though any topic related to the conference themes is welcome:
1. The relationship between European socialism and feminism, and its impact on China
2. Feminism and the discourse of modernity in China
3. CCP policies on women and feminism
4. International women's movements and the Chinese women's movement
5. Chinese women's organizations and activism in the twentieth century
6. Feminism and its relations with diverse women's groups in China
7. Chinese male intellectuals and feminism
8. Theorizing Chinese feminism in the semi-colonial context
9. Feminism in cross-cultural and translingual practices
10. Feminism and cultural change
11. Discovering women's voices: methodologies in historical research.
Please submit paper abstracts in both Chinese and English before June 30, 2002 to:
Chen Yan
Department of History
Fudan University
Shanghai, 200433
E-mail: history@fudan.ac.cn
