Oneself as a Female Deity: Representations of Empress Cizi as Guangyin

Yale University's Professor Li Yuhang will discuss the practices of the Empress Dowager Cixi's embodiment of Guanyin at Harvard University.

Discussant: James Robson, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Professor Li will discuss the practices of the Empress Dowager Cixi’s embodiment of Guanyin, the most influential female deity in China. The Empress Dowager (1835-1908) embodied this deity via different mediums such as painting, photographs, and fashion. Professor Li will demonstrate the religious and historical consequences of Cixi’s particular vision of herself as a deity. By focusing on Cixi’s practice of dressing up as Guanyin, she will explain how Cixi combines theatricality with religiosity in different mediums and how she participates in refashioning her identity in terms of gender and religion.

Yuhang Li received her PhD in East Asian languages and civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2011 and is currently a postdoctoral associate at the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University. Her primary research interest is gender and material practice in relation to Buddhism in Ming and Qing China. Her dissertation “Gendered Materialization: An Investigation of Women’s Artistic and Literary Reproductions of Guanyin in Late Imperial China” examines how lay Buddhist women participated in the cult of Guanyin by reproducing images of her through different material forms to reach religious salvation.