This year’s Gender Studies Workshop— The Beauty and the Book: Women, Knowledge, Literature, and Book Culture in Late Imperial China and Beyond— will explore new directions in the study of writings by and about women in late imperial China and will take place on April 25, 2025. It will have four panels: 1. Uncovering new connections in apparently familiar sources; 2. Rethinking gender roles and gender boundaries; 3. The relationship between gender and knowledge, especially for non-elite women; 4. Reverberations of these these Ming-Qing themes on gender in modern, post-modern, transnational, and diasporic contexts.

Panel 1: Uncovering the Hidden
Chair and Moderator: Elizabeth Perry, Harvard University
Discussant: Dorothy Ko, Barnard College

Ellen Widmer, Wellesley College — Mingyuan shiwei, Zhang Hao, and Wang Duanshu’s Editorial Hand
Wu Hung, University of Chicago — What is She Reading? A Closer Look at Some ‘Beautiful Women’ Paintings from Late Imperial China
Grace Fong, McGill University — Reflections on Life and Aging: Women’s Perspectives in the Qing
Shengqing Wu, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology — Embodying ‘Pure Love’: Tactility and Female Subjectivity in Republican Literature

Panel Two: New Perspectives on Gender Roles and Gender Boundaries
Chair and Moderator: Robin Yates, McGill University
Discussant: Sophie Volpp, UC Berkeley

Judith Zeitlin, University of Chicago — The Gender of the Operatic Voice from Li Yu (1611-1680) to Xu Dachun (1693-1771)
Wai-yee Li, Harvard University — The Pleasure of Refusal
Maram Epstein, University of Oregon — “How Conservative is Hou Zhi?
Rania Huntington, University of Wisconsin Madison — A Laughing Flower’s Guide to the Party: Knowledge, Pleasure, and Pattern in Jinghua yuan (Flowers in the Mirror)

Panel Three: Gender and Knowledge
Chair and Moderator: Catherine Yeh, Boston University
Discussant: Cynthia Brokaw, Brown University

Huan Jin, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology — Gender Dynamics in Fourteenth-Century Letter-Writing Manuals
Xu Man, Tufts University — Encyclopedias for Women: A Comparative Study of Kunde baojian (Precious Mirror for Female Virtue) and Kyuhap ch’ongsŏ (Miscellaneous Writings for the Inner Chambers)
Suyoung Son, Cornell University — Women and the Invention of the Modern Cookbook in China and Korea
Joan Judge, York University — Women as Vernacular Knowers in China’s Long Republic (1894-1954): What We Can Learn from Cheap Print

Panel Four: Modern, Post-modern, Diasporic, and Transnational Reverberations
Chair and Moderator: David Wang, Harvard University
Discussant: Eileen Chow, Duke University

Hyaeweol Choi, University of Iowa — Christian Networks and Gender Norms in Colonial Korea, with Comparative Perspectives on Japan and China
Paize Keulemans, Princeton University — The Poisonous Touch: Haptic Modes of Reading and Playing Jin Ping Mei in the late Ming and Early Twenty-first Century
Emma Teng, MIT — Cooking and Gender/Cooking and Genre: Grace Zia Chu (1899–1999)
Mingwei Song, Wellesley College — The Rise of She-SF: Chinese SF’s Next Wave