EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 16 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 191 tropes, represented as a series of unknowable Others. The gap between rhetoric and representation in Erpai highlights the presence of two competing discourses on women, one explicit and one implicit, coexisting in the same text. Mao Wen-fang (National Chung Cheng University) The Temptation of Beauty: Ambivalence in Qing Literati Portraits Key words: literati portrait, beauty, inscription, ambivalence, temptation Qing portraits of literati often conformed tomainstreamvalues, andmany of these paintings served to publicize political feats, promote Confucian values, and construct urbane self-images. Through viewing and inscribing on these paintings, literati formed a public space, in which they conversed with each other and produced col- lective memories. Instead of mainstream paintings, this paper studies a different kind of portraits: featuring a scholar accompanied by beauties. Meant to capture the leisurely lifestyle of literati, such portraits often feature explicitly sensual or subtly esoteric, may also be marked by remorse arising from religious repentance. The viewers’inscriptions often focus on the central subject’s (as well as the viewers’own) ambivalent attitude toward the temptation of beauty. On the one hand, they are sympathetic toward those who take pleasure in and yearn for beautiful women, attributing such desires to human nature. On the other hand, keenly aware of the poten- tial threat of such desires to morality, they also often utter religiously charged repentant opinions. Oscillating between human nature and moral concerns, literati-viewers’ inscriptions show strong ambivalence toward the sexual attraction of beautiful women. These paintings, together with the inscriptions on them, constitute an ideal venue for the examination of material and erotic desires. As cultural products of late imperial literati’s collec- tive creation, these portraits urge viewers to shuttle between representation and the represented, provoke their interpretations and opinions, and stimulate their desire to express themselves and communicate with each other. In sum, focusing on both visual and verbal aspects of late imperial paintings featuring literati accompanied by beauties, this paper examines how these portraits handle the question of pleasure, what representational strate- gies they adopted, and what ideological agenda and cultural assumptions such strategies reflect. Moriggi Angela (University Ca' Foscari Venice) Climate Change Discourse in China: What Space for a Gender Perspective? Key words: climate change, gender, vulnerability, NGOs, institutional discourse China is not only the world’s largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, but also a country extremely vulnerable to climate change. The recently released Third National Assessment Report on Climate Change, has once again confirmed the accelerating trend in temperature rise and glacier melting affecting the country. Altering of the ecosystems, loss in biodiversity and exacerbating of extreme weather events are just some of the threats challenging China’s climate resilience. Over the past ten years, the international community has come to realize the importance of coupling mitiga- tion efforts to adaptation ones, with a particular focus on the social dimension of climate change. A renewed attention to the “human face” of climate change has brought awareness over the specific climate-induced struggles experienced by women, particularly in underdeveloped rural areas. It is now an established fact that conditions of gender inequality cause greater vulnerability for women as a result of climate change impacts. The degree to which different countries have matured awareness over the need to include gender-specific analysis in mitigation and adaptation efforts might depend on socio-cultural and political peculiarities, contributing to different understandings of the nexus between climate change and gender. This paper aims to provide a state of the art of the relevance of gender perspectives in China’s institutional discourse on climate change. Findings mainly draw from an extensive literary review and from fieldwork research carried out in Beijing between June and December 2014. Results indicate that the topic is of grow- ing interest to a few non-governmental organizations but remains largely marginal for most development cooperation organizations, as well as for academic and governmental institutions. The research work also investigates potentials and limits for future developments.