This is co-sponsored by Rutgers Global-China Office. This is part of Louisa Schein's class, "Anthropology of China." It is open to the public. Zoom link is at the bottom of the page.
Abstract
Zhongxing, literally meaning ‘middle gender/sex’ or ‘neutral gender/sex’, is a mediated and gendered phenomenon in contemporary East Asian Chinese and Sinophone societies that refers to young women who do not perform the normative gender regardless of their sexual orientation. In this talk, I will be exploring the lived experience of zhongxing among women in urban China and Hong Kong, drawing from in-depth interviews and online discourse analysis. I argue that an identitarian approach is inadequate in understanding this precarious and ambiguous position in doing gender. Instead, informed by an interdisciplinary framework of transnational feminist and queer Asian studies, I propose a practice approach to understand women’s strategic resistance against gender binaries in their everyday life.
Bio
Eva Cheuk-Yin Li is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK. She has an interdisciplinary background, consisting of sociology, media and cultural studies, and gender and sexuality studies. She holds a PhD in Gender, Media, and Culture (King’s College London) and MPhil in Sociology (The University of Hong Kong). Her works have appeared in edited volumes, encyclopedias, and journals, such as East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Crime, Media, Culture, and Transformative Works and Culture. She is currently working on a monograph, tentatively titled Chinese Women Doing Zhongxing: Strategic Resistance against Gender Binaries, based on her award-winning doctoral dissertation.
Zoom Link
https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/91920811339?pwd=d0EyaWcrcnlMdklZaVNpZHBRR3hyQT09
Join by SIP
Meeting ID: 919 2081 1339
Password: 235522