#MeToo in China: Media, Activism, Patriarchy, Queer/ing Feminism and Beyond
November 18 (Friday) @12:00–2:00 EST
MW 329, University of Toronto, Scarborough Campus, and Zoom (hybrid)
Following the global #MeToo movement, activists in China have also demonstrated tenacity, #creativity, and strength despite systemic constraints, making the Chinese #MeToo movement one of the most resilient against all odds. More recently, a settlement in the US court between Chinese billionaire Richard Liu/Liu Qiangdong 刘强东 and Chinese graduate student #Jingyao is considered a landmark case for its unprecedented transparency.
This panel draws on some of the latest scholarship as well as activism experience on the Chinese #MeToo movement from the perspectives of media, sociology, feminist and queer studies, and religious studies. It will have comparative value for anyone interested in contemporary feminism, transnational activism, and the global flows of patriarchal politics and populism today.
Speakers
Ruoyun Bai received her Ph.D. in communications from the University of Illinois in 2007 and is Associate Professor of Media Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her teaching and research revolve around media as institutional, textual, and cultural practices and as technologies of mediation. She is attentive not only to textual and visual representations, but also to the materiality of such representations, i.e. how texts and images are produced and circulated in historically specific political, economic, social, ideological, and technological contexts. Her scholarship so far has focused on postsocialist China and its mediatized politics. She has co-edited two books: Television Drama in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2009) and Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2014). Her monograph, Staging Corruption: Chinese Television and Politics, came out from the University of British Columbia Press in 2015. She has published articles in areas such as the political economy of Chinese television, the relationship of Chinese writers and intellectuals to the market and the state, and the Internet-based youth culture in China. Currently she is writing her second monograph, Gendered Scandals: Chinese Women and Digital Media.
Yige Dong is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Global Gender & Sexuality Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo.Dong’s research interests include feminist political economy, labor, feminist movements, and comparative-historical methods. Her book-in-progress, The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Industrial China, examines the century-long transformation of care work among the Chinese working-class, and her articles have appeared in International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Critical Asian Studies, Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, American Quarterly, and Modern China, among others. Dong was a Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellow in China Studies (2021-22) and a Woodrow Wilson National Fellow in Women’s Studies (2018-19). She is currently serving on the editorial board of the Made in China Journal.
Ting Guo is Assistant Professor of Language Studies, University of Toronto, focusing on religion, politics, and gender in transnational Asia. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Edinburgh and was a research fellow at the University of Oxford and Purdue University. She is writing her first book monograph, Politics of Love: Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Critical Research on Religion, Anthropology Today, and Journal of Religion and Film. She co-hosts a Mandarin podcast called “in-betweenness” (@shichapodcast).
Sara Liao is a media scholar and feminist. She works in the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. Her research interests intersect digital labor, feminist studies, globalization, and East Asian popular culture. Her book Fashioning China (Pluto, 2020) investigates gendered digital labor in China’s maker culture and fashion industry. She has published in renowned academic journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Convergence. She currently works on researching and writing about the tangled relationship between digital culture of misogyny and popular nationalism in China.
Qiqi Xiao is a Chinese queer feminist activist and organizer. She was the first person to put forward #metooinchina (#metoo在中国）on Chinese social media and initiated the #Iamnotaperfectvictimeither (我也不是完美受害者）campaign against rape culture in China. Her broader organizing work centers around the issues of gender-based violence, anti-racism, queer/ing rights, and bridging queer feminist communities. She is dedicated to forging local grassroots community building as well as transnational feminist movements in China, Canada, and the United States. Her expertise is in digital activism, community organizing, community-based research, and capacity training. Outside of activism, she is a dancer who loves impulsive improv.
The panel discussion is organized by the Department of Language Studies, UTSC and sponsored by the Department of Arts, Culture and Media, UTSC.
Date: November 18 (Friday)
Time: 12:00 pm–2:00 pm EST
Venue: MW 329, UTSC and Zoom (hybrid)
To register online: https://utoronto.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMvc-qvrjojGdOkFJVNkc9cZsMPvvrKG55f?fbclid=IwAR0VCNWLaB_S7rLJsZsgoasu_j-pHPYx7GoBuP5A1Z3kSQVVyL0UalKtqag
Posted by: Ting Guo <tg.guo@utoronto.ca>