Monday Seminar:
Xin Huang
UW System Fellow (2015-2016)
Women’s and Gender Studies, UW-Milwaukee
What new things can personal digital photography tell us about gendered lives? Does digital photography provide a wider range of gendered activities and gendered images? What can we learn about women’s lives and senses of self as “photographers”? How to process and make sense of digital photography collections? How to (and who gets to) determine the biographic relevance and significance of the photos? Using the personal photos I collected in China from women who lived through the Mao era, I discuss how the changing materiality of digital photography affects women’s auto/biographical photo practices, the opportunities and challenges this brings to the study of women’s lives, and the challenges in collecting (scanning and copying), categorizing, and analyzing the digital photographs.
Xin Huang is an Assistant Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Huang received her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in Women’s and Gender Studies in 2010. Her main area of research is gender and sexuality in contemporary China, particularly the representation of gender and sexuality in oral narrative and visual forms. She has recently finished a book project entitled “The Gendered Legacy of Mao: A Study of Women’s Live Stories in Contemporary China.” The talk is part of a larger project entitled “The Taming of the Maoist Women: Changing Representations of Gender In China in Personal Photo Albums,” which analyzes the visual/bodily manifestation of gender as recorded in personal photo albums and women’s narratives about them.