CGED Research Seminar Series

Speaker: Dr Ting Guo, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Gender Studies, School of Humanities HKU

Respondent: Professor Nicole Huang, Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Moderator: Dr Alvin K Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, HKU

Date: November 25, 2020 (Wednesday)

Time: 7:30 PM

Delivery: Zoom

From China's first feminists, writers in prewar Japan, to premodern nuns and urban work girls, this talk compares the history of female friendship across different cultural contexts, in order to show the ideological changes and the broader connections between gender, modernity, and nationhood. More importantly, I want to discuss the apparent contradiction within the notion of friendship, and female friendship in particular: the aspect of inclusiveness in terms of socialising, creating, and experiencing the sense of the public, and the aspect of exclusiveness as the sense of communities is equally defined by whom we exclude, and those who are not one of us. By analysing the dialectic relationship between the individual and the community, the private and the public, this talk also hopes to shed light on the meaning of (gendered) identity and belonging in our time.

Ting Guo is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Gender Studies Programme at the University of Hong Kong, focusing on (post)secularism and political religion, including issues of gender and technology. She gained her PhD in Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh and was research fellow at Oxford and Purdue Universities before fate brought her to Hong Kong. Recent publications include the article “Politics of love: Love as a religious and political discourse in modern China through the lens of political leaders” published in “Critical Research on Religion”.She is currently writing a book on love as a political discourse in modern China.