Conference: Poetics and Politics of Embodiment in Premodern China
Conference: Poetics and Politics of Embodiment in Premodern China
Date & Time: April 17 to 18, 2026 | All Day, In-Person Event; find the program here:?/hsiang-lectures/conferences/poetics-and-politics-e...?
Location: 海角社区 · Thomson House (3650 Rue McTavish, Montréal, QC H3A 1X1)
This conference brings together sixteen papers that investigate how bodies in premodern China were transformed, disciplined, and rendered legible through diverse practices. Moving across religious traditions, aesthetic forms, medical and legal archives, and vernacular cultures, the contributors collectively show that representations of the body in premodern China are best understood not as static essences but as technologies—dynamic configurations produced at the intersection of material craft, textual mediation, ethical systems, and social negotiations.
Our gathering relies on diverse disciplinary approaches, challenging the very notion of the “body” as a stable analytic category. What constituted the human body and embodiment in premodern China, and how might such conceptions intersect with—or diverge from—those in other historical and cultural contexts? How did ideas of corporeality intersect with questions of gender, class, performance, and spirituality? By foregrounding the body as both metaphorical and material, we seek to foster conversations that unsettle inherited binaries—such as mind and matter, self and other, text and flesh.
Our diverse papers illuminate a shared preoccupation with the body as a technological, semiotic, and moral project—one articulated through spinning wheels and cookpots, diagrams and lyrics, sleeping mats and battlefield clinics, thresholds and miracle tales. By attending to how bodies are constituted, this interdisciplinary symposium offers a polyphonic account of embodiment in premodern China, revealing the inventiveness with which historical actors made sense of human life and its possibilities. Ultimately, our goal is to open new dialogues across various traditions, and to rethink how the body became meaningful in premodern China and beyond.
This conference is open to the public. If you would like to attend lunch on either or both days,
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This event is supported by: