“Emerging Feminist Research on Asia” brings together scholars from Asia and North America, graduate students, and the general public to unsettle familiar metanarratives and dominant discourses about Asia and people of Asian descent through a feminist lens.
This series of seven lectures and graduate training workshops ponders how the analytical category of gender can shed new light on the study of globalism and globalization, science, political economy, and social movements.
We borrow the use of gender as an analytical category from feminist historian and Gender Studies pioneer Joan Scott, who in 1986 defined gender as “a constitutive element of social relationship based on perceived differences between the sexes and a primary way of signifying relationships of power". Through scholarly talks and feminist curriculum building workshop, this project explores the ways in which gender both marks state power, and registers marginalized groups’ uprisings against the state. Our speakers examine how a feminist approach that takes gender as a constitutive social element reveals the ways in which states and grassroot organizations deal with urgent contemporary social issues such as HIV AIDS prevention, mental health crises, labor migration and precarious employment, as well as how case studies such as the beauty industry, and women’s local and transnational networks of solidarity can illuminate broader configurations of power.
We situate our discussion within what Hayot and Chen (2015) call “Global Asias,” which they conceptualize as an inclusive understanding of Asia not as a cluster of nation-states but as a portal of national, international and diasporic communities. Our series features recently published and award-winning scholarship on India, Vietnam, China, Japan, Korea and the Philippines. Yet, the methodology that guides the research and the workshops showcased in this project moves beyond the nation-state as a unit of inquiry and, instead, studies Asia within a transnational, transregional, and global circulation of people, commodities, and cultural productions. Through a feminist methodology, this project advances a study of Asian economies, cultures, and societies as interconnected and fundamental in shaping the global past, present, and future.
Maria Cecilia Hwang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University. She is a qualitative sociologist who employs ethnography to examine the co-constitution of borders and globalization, the state regulation of border crossings, and the navigation of borders in everyday life. Hwang has published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Gender & Society, WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, International Migration Review, and International Labor and Working-Class History. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and AAUW.
Gal Gvili studies and teaches modern and contemporary Chinese literature at McGill University. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal of Asian Studies, Religions, Comparative Literature Studies, China and Asia: A Journal in Historical Studies and the edited volume Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India 1840s-1860s. Her book Imagining India in Modern China: Literary Decolonization and the Imperial Unconscious 1895-1962 (Columbia University Press, 2022) examines how the image of India, in particular, Chinese writers’ multifaceted visions of Sino-Indian connections, shaped the making of a new literature in the twentieth century.
Our speaker series will take place on un-ceded Kanien’kehá:ka territories, onto which McGill University is built. We honour the sovereignty of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation and recognize them as the custodians of Tiohtià:ke (island of Montréal) where we gather today.
These lands and waters have for millenia, served as an important site of meeting, exchange, diplomacy, and stewardship amongst many First Nations peoples, including the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and Anishinabag Nations. It is for these reasons that European colonial settlers were first drawn to the island in 1534. We seek to understand the longstanding history that have allowed us to reside on these lands, and our everyday participation and perpetuation of colonialism. The Kanien’kehá:ka peoples’ stewardship of Tiohtià:ke, past and present, is a model for how we must respect and relate to their lands and communities as a whole.
Upcoming and past lectures speaker series
Upcoming graduate workshops as part of the speaker series