The 4th Northeast Conference on Chinese Thought (NECCT) will be held on November 7 – 8, 2015 at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, CT. It will be co-sponsored with Yale’s Center for East Asian Studies and Wesleyan’s College of East Asian Studies. Expect an official call for abstracts in the near future.
Daily Archives: March 11, 2015
Weingarten review of Dissertation on Motherhood in Early China
Oliver Weingarten’s review of Smadar Winter’s University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation, “Motherhood in Early China,” is available online. A couple highlights (from the review, not the dissertation itself):
- “…An example of her disagreement with earlier scholarship is her response to attempts by Catherine Despeux and Livia Kohn to highlight the “prominence of motherhood” in the Laozi 老子. Winter counters this claim with a well-conceived alternative reading that argues for the secondary importance of motherhood in the text.”
- “…In her conclusion, Winter revisits debates about two paradigms in the gender history of early China: “woman as victim” and “woman as agent.” While she acknowledges the importance of the latter, she reminds her readers that “women’s agency was always defined in the service of male interests.” (p. 215) To acknowledge this is crucial so as to not to forget the “forms of oppression from which early Chinese women have suffered.” Consequently, Winter argues against “a neutral-to-positive tone which seems to be saying: Yes, there was oppression, but women were still able to lead meaningful lives and fulfill their humanity in the roles that subordinated them.” (p. 216)”
Sung in NDPR on Hutton’s Xunzi
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
2015.03.16 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews
Xunzi, Xunzi: The Complete Text, Eric L. Hutton (tr.), Princeton University Press, 2014, xxxi+ 397pp., $39.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780691161044.
Reviewed by Winnie Sung, Nanyang Technological University