Description
Book SynopsisTani Barlow outlines the stakes of what she calls “the event of women” in China—the discovery of the truth that women are the reproductive equivalent of men, revealing how historical universals are effected in places where truth claims are not usually sought.
Trade Review“This book presents a glorious rethinking of the historical and theoretical relation established between ‘women’ and social ‘truth’ as a universal but also specifically Chinese ‘event’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tani Barlow dissects complexity with forensic precision. In exceptionally clear exposition, she invites us to account for our present through a rigorous analysis of concepts, histories, and the theories of human and female life spun therefrom. Illuminating and essential.” -- Rebecca E. Karl, Professor of History, New York University
“Shifting critical focus from area studies and nation, this alluringly erudite book theorizes capital and intellectual history to recenter modern China on the event of women. Tani Barlow positions her delightful reading of hundreds of gendered advertising images as harbingers of Chinese twentieth-century cultural life while reviving exciting Chinese traditions of feminist sociology and political thought. A provocative and creative study,
In the Event of Women brings previous approaches to sinology into destabilizing dialogue with broader debates in intellectual history, visual studies, and feminism.” -- Timothy Murray, Professor of Comparative Literature and Literatures in English, Cornell University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction to the Event 1
1. Conditions of Thinking 19
2. Foundational Chinese Sociology 71
3. Vernacular Sociology 100
4. The Social Life of Commercial Ephemera 123
5. Nakedness and Interiority 162
6. Wang Guangmei's
Qipao 191
Conclusion 220
Notes 231
Bibliography 259
Index 283
