Contemporary China | Everyday Erotics: Older Chinese Lesbians

The Cornell Contemporary China Initiative is pleased to start its spring '22 lecture series with Denise Tang of the Lingnan University of HK. Her talk is titled,

'Everyday Erotics: Older Chinese Lesbians and Bisexual Women'

This talk presents the life stories of older Chinese lesbians and bisexual women (born in the 1940s and 50s) in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan through an interdisciplinary ethnography combining fieldwork and cultural analysis of inter-Asia mediations of femininities and masculinities. I will examine the figure of the Chinese lesbian as both real and imagined in our historical narratives and contemporary social worlds.

Denise Tang, is an Associate Professor, in the Department of Cultural Studies, and the Associate Dean, of the Arts Department at Lingnan University, in Hong Kong.

The Contemporary China Initiative this spring is directed by Arnika Fuhrmann, Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell University and the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema.

This semester's CCCI lecture series is connected to a course Asian 6623 being taught by Professor Fuhrmann called 'The City.'

CCCI spring 2022 is generously co-sponsored by the East Asia Program, the Department of History, Asian Studies, and the Migrations initiative.