Gender Studies Seminar

Friday, February 6, 2009 4:00 pm
Gender Studies Workshop
Poetry, Gender, and Ethnicity: Manchu and Mongol Women Writers in Qing-Dynasty Beijing
Wilt Idema, Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University

About the talk: Professor Idema surveyed the Chinese-language poetry of Manchu women, focusing on a few representative authors. These women writers formed a closely-knit group, mostly writing shi. As educated women, they fully embraced traditional morality--some even practiced gegu. Special attention will be paid to Nalanxunbao, who was Mongol by birth but Manchu by marriage. She not only wrote at least one poem in which she explicitly discusses her ethnicity, but also had plans to compile a major anthology of Manchu women writers.

About the speaker: Wilt Idema teaches Chinese literature at Harvard University. He has published extensively on premodern vernacular literature. More recently, he has also become interested in women's literature of imperial China. His most important publication in that field is The
Red Brush: Women Writers of Imperial China (with Beata Grant; Harvard University Asia Center, 2004). His Heroines of Jiangyong: Chinese Narrative Ballads in Women's Script will be published by the University of Washington Press in the spring of 2009.

Friday, April 10, 2009 4:00 pm
Gender Studies Workshop
The Perils of Pregnancy: Comparing Risk in
Chinese and U.S. Advice Manuals
Suzanne Z. Gottschang, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Smith College
Discussant: Rubie Watson, Senior Lecturer Emerita, Harvard University

About the talk: Risk analysis presumes a universal scientific basis. If this presumption holds true, then the same dangers should be identified wherever they may occur. To explore the extent to which risk is or is not neutral, Professor Zhang-Gottschang compared a sample of popular pregnancy advice manuals published in China and the United States. A primary focus of these manuals is the identification of potential risks to fetuses and pregnant women and the prescription of behavioral solutions to minimize exposure to these risks. The authors of the manuals claim to base their suggestions on medical scientific authority; however, a comparison of these books reveals the social construction of purported dangers. The findings indicate that culturally specific ideas about diet, gender, work, and leisure activities all influence what is considered harmful to fetuses and pregnant women. The comparative approach indicates that risk, often articulated in terms of scientific objectivity, is in fact culturally constructed. Because this framework is used to formulate policy and law, it is crucial that social science researchers continue to question the neutrality of risk analysis.

About the speaker: Suzanne Zhang-Gottschang is an Associate Professor at Smith College. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh and has Master's degrees in Public Health and in Anthropology from UCLA. She was an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies in 1999 and a visiting scholar at China's Academy of Preventive Medicine from 1994 to 1996. Her current research focuses on the realm of Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine in China and the United States. Her book, Hospitalizing Motherhood: Medicine and Modernity in a Beijing Hospital, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
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