Teaching Gender/Sexuality and East Asia

with Hitomi Tonomura
Professor of History

and Liang Luo
Professor of Chinese Literature

Tuesday, February 6, 2007

6:45pm-8:30pm

1014 Tisch Hall
Professor Tonomura will discuss some possible pitfalls that she has encountered in giving lectures and leading discussions on East Asian gender-related topics. Her understanding comes from her experience in having taught courses at three different institutions, Stanford University, Macalester College, and the UM. Most of her courses have dealt with premodern Japan and China but she also has given guest lectures on topics related to modern and contemporary issues on gender and women. She suggests that we think about overlapping issues, such as: assumptions and presumptions (the temporal and spatial distance between the audience and the topic), changing political and economic climate and its relationship to the academic subject, self-awareness of one's own society, hyper-media problems, developing intellectual empathy toward the subject without losing a critical outlook, possible relationship between the instructor's gender and ethnicity, etc.

Professor Luo will use her course syllabi (last and current semesters) to talk about things she felt could be improved in teaching gender in the East Asian context. The two courses are "The Modern Girl of China" and "The Politics of Emotion in Modern China."