Beyond Exemplar Tales: Interpreting Chinese Women’s Biographies

The Fairbank Center at Harvard University presents Joan Judge as part of their Gender Studies Workshop.

Speaker: Joan Judge

Professor Judge will introduce key conceptual issues explored in Beyond Exemplar Tales: Women’s Biography in Chinese History (Joan Judge and Hu Ying, editors, 2011). These issues include the question of how we approach biographies as historical sources: Are they authentic records of their subjects’ lives? Or, are they refractions of historically specific, world-making projects and/or the cultural agendas of particular biographers? She will also address the question of genre: What Chinese narrative forms, if any, correspond to the Western notion of biography, and which genres besides the conventional liezhuan—such as letters, prefaces, poems—potentially provide biographical insights? Professor Judge will situate Beyond Exemplar Tales within the context of current scholarship on women’s history and discuss recent and prospective research directions in this field.  

Joan Judge is a professor in the departments of history and humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of The Precious Raft of History: The Past, the West, and the Woman Question in China (2008) and Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (1996). She is currently involved in a multi-year, international collaborative project entitled “Gender and Cultural Production: A New Approach to Chinese Women's Journals in the Early 20th Century.” Outcomes of the project will include a comprehensive database, a collective volume, and a single-authored monograph tentatively entitled “Everydayness as a Critical Category of Gender Analysis: Textual and Material Intersections in the Chinese Periodical Press.”

Organizers: Ellen Widmer, Christina Gilmartin, Vanessa Fong, and Weili Ye.