Category Archives: Gender

CFP: Women as Exemplary Persons 女君子 in the Ru (Confucian) Tradition

Call For Papers: “Women as Exemplary Persons 女君子 in the Ru (Confucian) Tradition”

Washington, D.C. March 8-10th, 2019

(Link to Conference Poster)

Keynotes:

  • Ann A. Pang-White (University of Scranton)
  • Anna Sun (Kenyon College)
  • Robert C. Neville (Boston University)

Confucianism is often criticized for being misogynistic and patriarchal in ways that go beyond similar critiques of other intellectual traditions by implying that Confucianism is inconceivable apart from these elements. Two more recent works begin to challenge this way of thinking by drawing on nuances and elaborating the contexts of traditional Confucian teachings on women: Ann A. Pang-White’s translation of The Confucian Four Books for Women (2018) and Robert C. Neville’s “Confucianism and the Feminist Revolution: Ritual Definition and the Social Construction of Gender Roles” in The Good is One, Its Manifestations Many (2016). Also, Anna Sun’s sociological work in progress on women in the global revival of Confucianism is quite promising in indicating a very positive trajectory for women in the tradition.

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CFP: Panel at 2019 AAS on Women and Confucian philosophy

If you have work in progress concerning the status of women and Confucian philosophy or Chinese history and are interested in presenting that at a conference, consider participating in the 2019 Association of Asian Studies meetings in Denver on March 21-24, 2019. A philosopher is putting together a panel on this subject for AAS. If interested, please send your 250 word abstract and paper title no later than July 26 to Ryan Nichols at rnichols -at- fullerton -dot- edu.

Info about the conference: http://www.asian-studies.org/Conferences/AAS-Annual-Conference/Conference-Menu/CALL-FOR-PROPOSALS/CFP-2019-Home

New Book: Huang, Intimate Memory

SUNY has published Martin W. Huang, Intimate Memory: Gender and Mourning in Late Imperial China.

Editorial summary:

In the first study of its kind about the role played by intimate memory in the mourning literature of late imperial China, Martin W. Huang focuses on the question of how men mourned and wrote about women to whom they were closely related. Drawing upon memoirs, epitaphs, biographies, litanies, and elegiac poems, Huang explores issues such as how intimacy shaped the ways in which bereaved male authors conceived of womanhood and how such conceptualizations were inevitably also acts of self-reflection about themselves as men. Their memorial writings reveal complicated self-images as husbands, brothers, sons, and educated Confucian males, while their representations of women are much more complex and diverse than the representations we find in more public genres such as Confucian female exemplar biographies.

Weekly Books of Interest (27 April 2018)

Ann Pang-White. The Confucian Four Books for Women: A New Translation of the Nü Sishu and the Commentary of Wang Xiang. Oxford, 2018. (Amazon link here.)

Bret Hinsch. Women in Ancient China. Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. (Amazon link here.)

Kevin DeLapp. Partial Values: A Comparative Study in the Limits of Objectivity. Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. (Amazon link here.)

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