EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Gender Studies 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 190 exchanging poems with both old courtesan friends, newly associated gentry ladies and male literati. In this way, Yang was able to establish a network transgressing the limits of the inner chamber and the pleasure quarters. I argue that, the poetry of Yang Wan, a transforming courtesan, not only discoursed with highly stylized topos and genres in a well-established male literary tradition, but also opened a window to look into a larger historical transition of women writers’ identities from courtesans to gentry ladies. Moreover, many significant analogies of women writings in the Ming and Qing dynasties included Yang Wan’s poetic works. Anthologizing her poetry along with paratexts can be interpreted as a process of re-contextualizing and re-stabilizing this fluid image of a transforming courtesan into an organized textual space informed by the anthologizers’ intentions, which turn her into a layered image engaged with various discourses of gender, literature and politics. Jiao Lin (SOAS, University of London) Experiencing the Body: (Anti) Breast-Binding during the Republican Era, 1910s-1940s Key words: breast-binding, experience, identity, performance, agency Since the 1910s, women were frequently criticized for binding their breasts in China, which led to a “Natural Breast Movement” in the 1920s. Recently, breast-binding has attracted increasing scholarly attention. Existing research on breast-binding either focuses on the political or emancipative discourse, or the cultural constructions of bodily aesthetics. This paper, however, addresses the importance to explore women’s various experiences, practices and performances of their bodies, and the multiple meanings lay in their actions. It asks: how did women perceive and manage their bodies? How did their bodily experi- ences construct their identities, their roles at home, school and in society? How did the nationalist and aesthetic discourse influence women’s perceptions and actions of the body, and vice versa? This paper will be divided into three sections. Firstly, I examine how ‘the intimate body’ influenced women’s self- identities, and their roles at home, and how the ability to access modern goods such as brassieres defined their self-positioning in the society. Secondly, I explore how anti-breast-binding regulations were carried out at girls’ schools and the multiple meanings of female students’ performances. Thirdly, taking women frommore remote and rural areas in consideration, I shall demonstrate that women’s vulnerability to physi- cal violence limited their choices of how they could present their bodies. The female body thus provides a lens through which we can probe the multiple power relations among individuals, popular discourse and institutional disciplines. Overall, by using readers’ letters, school journals, memoirs and oral histories, this paper argues that the variety of women’s bodily actions is beyond the theoretical frameworks that portray women as either “active agents” or “passive victims”, instead, agency and collusion coexisted in many circumstances. Macdonald Alastair Ewan (SOAS, University of London) Women in Erpai: The Gap between Rhetoric and Representation Key words: Ling Mengchu, Erpai, Li Zhi, feminine Other, masculine subjectivity The late Ming short story collections Pai’an jingqi 拍案驚奇 and Erke pai’an jingqi 二刻拍案驚奇 (together known as Erpai 二拍 ), authored by Ling Mengchu 凌濛初 (1580–1644), have been credited by a variety of scholars with expressing a relatively “progressive” attitude towards women. The collections show a strong influence from the philosophies of the heterodox thinker Li Zhi 李贄 (1527–1602), who argued the notion that women were not inherently less able than men. Scattered throughout the collec- tions are discursive asides addressed at the audience, a number of which not only support this notion, but also develop it to assert that women’s sexual desire is no weaker than men’s, and that widowed women should not be looked down upon for remarrying. However, the strong rhetorical stance taken in these discursive asides is not reflected in the textual representations of women in the narrative itself. Instead, masculine subjectivity is reasserted and the female characters are portrayed using established