This mini-seminar will examine in four sessions various approaches to the synchronous emergence of gendered and radical perspectives on history and practice in China's modern period (late-19th century through today). Each session will take up one iconic feminist thinker/writer from four different eras to think about the intertwining of radical histories with gendered concerns. Session one will discuss He-Yin Zhen, the early 20th-century anarcho-feminist thinker whose work is foundational to radical rethinkings of Chinese and world history; session two will take up Ding Ling, an iconic 1920s/30s feminist writer; session three will examine the fiction writers Ru Zhijuan and her daughter Wang Anyi for the 1950s/1980s; and session four will explore Dai Jinhua's feminist scholarship on film and narrative in the 1990s/2000s.
