Captive Beauties: Gender Practices and Depictions of Women in Late Imperial China

Dr. Leihua Weng discusses the women exhibited in Captive Beauties. She will describe the activities the women in the paintings are engaged in, acknowledging the social and cultural norms related to the lives of women and gender practices in Late Imperial China. This talk also discusses how some gender practices were reformed or abolished at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in China. Dr. Weng is the Chinese Endowed Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Kalamazoo College. She completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. She is interested in various topics on tradition(s), including their formation, transmission, and transformation.