- Language: English
- Room 201, 2/F, May Hall, The University of Hong Kong
- April 9, 2019 12:00 nn – 1:00 pm
- (Tel) (852) 3917-5772
- Enquiry: ihss@hku.hk
ABSTRACT
The Anglo-American term and historical concept of “domesticity” does not translate easily into Chinese. Although Confucianism had long connected the household to the state through ideology and prescriptive practices, Anglo/American ideas about “domesticity” were translated into Chinese first by way of Japan in the late nineteenth century, and second by way of American missionary educators in the twentieth century. This history of translation reveals that “domesticity” as an ideology and as a pedagogical practice never became popular in China, and also that Euro-American historiographical frameworks, which were once thought to be universal map poorly onto other places. Thus, this talk explores the ways in which women’s history has adopted the power structures of Euro-American historiography, and calls for more inclusive frames to de-colonize gender history.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Elizabeth LaCouture is the founding director of the first gender studies major in Hong Kong. She earned her PhD in Chinese history at Columbia University and taught East Asian history at Colby College before joining the Faculty of Arts at HKU in 2017. She is the author of a forthcoming book on family, house, and home in early twentieth-century Tianjin, China, and is currently working on a GRF-funded history of beauty and cosmetics in the Sinophone world. This talk is based on her contribution to an American Historical Review Roundtable on “Unsettling Domesticities.”
