Overview
My dissertation, tentatively entitled "Medical, Monstrous, and Myriad: Controversial Female Bodies and Gender Politics in China, 1500-1890" is a cultural history of women’s unruly bodies. This project asks how medical practitioners, literary writers, and women themselves understood and rationalize women’ myriad bodily experiences—monstrous birthing, varied menstrual patterns, exceptional reproductive capacities, and unpredictable impregnation processes. Against dominant historiographies that emphasize a medical history of women’s bodies from male physicians’ perspectives, this project integrates a variety of sources, ranging from medical manuscripts, recipe collections, illustrated newspapers to miscellaneous notes, in order to examine contingent and unstable categories of women's health and illnesses, and therefore gives voice to multiple historical actors.
Advisors: TJ Hinrichs, Kristin Anne Roebuck, Suyoung Son
Research Focus
Currently I am exploring history of gender and bodies through medicine and its intersection with other kinds of knowledge. More broadly, I have developed passion for history of knowledge, history of medicine, material culture, and feminist critiques of medicalization.
Publications
Book Review
Book Review of Lu Shuying’s Infant Feeding and the Reconstruction of Motherhood in Modern China (Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 2020) in Chinese Studies in History, Volume 56, Issue 1, 2023.
Public History Writing
Interview with TJ Hinrichs on the Diverse Imaginations of Chinese Medicine and Healing Practices, the Paper 澎湃, 2020. (https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_10020482)
Review of Yi Ruolan’s Three Nuns and Six Grannies: Exploration of Ming Women and Society San gu liu po: Mingdai funü yu shehui de Shijian (Shanghai: Zhong xi shuju, 2019), the Paper 澎湃, 2019. (https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_4993286)