Wednesday, May 1, 2024
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383

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Opposition to superstition has been a major theme in the Chinese Revolution. This talk takes a historical excursion back to wartime Yan’an（1937–1947）, the holy land of the Communist revolution. It discusses the gender politics in the CCP’s campaign against “superstition” at Yan’an that lasted from 1944 to 1945. The Party propaganda singled out male shaman-healers, as well as the traditional ritual order they embodied, as “feudal superstitions” that obstructed the reach of modern medicine to the masses, subjected rural young women to ritual violence, and destroyed lives. The Party crushed the ritual masculinities of shamans through mass meetings, confessions, public trials, and other mass-line methods that it had recently developed in the intra-party Rectification Movement（1942-1945）. Drawing on traditional rhetoric of patriarchy and female sexuality, the propaganda aimed to establish the Party as the new moral and political authority that would save rural women’s reproductive bodies for the health of the incipient Party-state. The gender politics in the Yan’an campaign thus offer important insights into both promises and limits of CCP’s wartime social reforms, and into the long-term impact of CCP’s mass mobilization mechanisms.

Xiaofei Kang holds a Ph.D. in Chinese history from Columbia University（2000）, and she is currently Professor of Religion and Chinese History at the George Washington University. She teaches courses on religions in East Asia, and her research focuses on gender, ethnicity, revolution, and Chinese religions. She is the author of The Cult of the Fox：Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China（Columbia, 2006）, co-author（with Donald S. Sutton）of Contesting the Yellow Dragon：Ethnicity, Religion and the State in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland（Brill, 2016）, and co-editor（with Jia Jinhua and Ping Yao）of Gendering Chinese Religion：Subject, Identity and Body（SUNY Press, 2014）. Her recent book, Enchanted Revolution：Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda（Oxford, 2023）examines the intertwined discourses of religion, gender, and the Chinese Communist revolution.

Sponsor（s）：Center for Chinese Studies