About the talk:
From the “Feminists Five” to the ongoing MeToo campaign, from heated debates on whether a woman should marry to controversies around female standup comedians’ remarks on men’s privilege, recent years have seen the spectacular rise of women’s voices and activism on- and offline in the People’s Republic of China. How to understand this new wave of Chinese feminism and contextualize it in the country’s quickly changing political arena? Drawing on published work and recent observations, this talk maps out the overall landscape of Chinese women’s agitations and identifies two latent strands of, what I and Angela Wu call, “made-in-China feminism.” Moreover, Dong will explain how such new political energy has further complicated China’s long-standing class inequality and its deepening care crisis.

About the speaker:
Yige Dong is an assistant professor in sociology and global gender & sexuality studies at SUNY Buffalo. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include political economy, labor, gender, contentious politics, and comparative-historical methods. Dong’s research on Chinese labor politics and feminist movements has appeared in International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Critical Asian Studies, Modern China, among others. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the politics of care work during the rise and fall of industrial socialism in China.