Legible and Thus Legitimate? Reading and Blurring Gender in China, Today and Yesterday

Abstract

In her keynote address to the conference from which this special issue of China Perspectives has emerged, Prof. Gail Hershatter spoke of gender and “blindspotting”: how practices of looking and bringing something into focus may cause other aspects to simultaneously fade out (Hershatter 2019). This idea builds on her previous work conceptualising gender as a “kind of lens that allows one to zoom in and out,” an anchoring foothold that is “multi-scalar rather than scalable” (Hershatter 2012: 88...