China Gender Studies Workshop
This workshop series brings together scholars whose research on China in various disciplines and time periods examines the significance of gender for social, cultural, economic, and political issues.


Friday, September 25, 2009  4:15 pm

Women Can Hold Up Half the Sky: A Fourth Told Tale
Xueping Zhong, Tufts University

By revisiting one of the best-known Mao era phrases “women can hold up half the sky” against the backdrop of three existing “tales” developed in the last three decades in response to the Chinese Communist Party–led women’s liberation movement, Professor Zhong aims at reevaluating its historical significance and argues for the need to understand it as an important historical legacy for women in today’s post–women’s liberation China. 

Xueping Zhong is associate professor of Chinese literature and culture in the Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature at Tufts University. She received her BA in English from Shanghai Normal University and her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Iowa. Professor Zhong’s publications include: Masculinity Besieged? Issues of Modernity and Male Subjectivity in Chinese Literature of the Late Twentieth Century (2000); Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era, edited with Wang Zheng and Bai Di (2001); 《文化与社会转型》(Culture and Social Transformation) edited with Cao Tianyu and Liao Kebin (2006). Her forthcoming book from the University of Hawaii Press is titled Mainstream Culture Refocused: Television Drama, Society, and Production of Meaning in Contemporary China.

Location: CGIS South, Room S153
1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA
Contact: lkluz@fas.harvard.edu