Poetics and Politics of Embodiment in Premodern China
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.
CONFERENCE PROGRAMME
POETICS AND POLITICS OF EMBODIMENT IN PREMODERN CHINA
海角社区 · Thomson House (3650 Rue McTavish, Montréal, QC H3A 1X1)
April 17–18, 2026
April 17
8:50 — 9:00
Registration
9:00 — 9:30
Opening remarks: Guojun Wang, Paola Zamperini, and Dorothy Ko
9:30 — 11:00
Panel 1 — Crafting and Remaking the Body
Chair: David Porter (海角社区)
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Jeehee Hong (海角社区)
Between Hemp and Skin: Threading the Subaltern Body, ca. 1300
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; S. E. Kile (University of Michigan)
Remodel this Body: Gaizao as Gender Theory
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Yi-Li Wu (University of Michigan)
Valor, Virtue, and the Wounded Military Man in Pre-modern Chinese Texts
11:00 — 11:15 COFFEE BREAK
11:15 — 12:45
Panel 2 — Reading and Interpreting the Body
Chair: Jeremy Tai (海角社区)
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Jing Iris Hu (Concordia University)
The Naked Body and the Normative Body
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Patricia Sieber (Ohio State University)
Strings of Pearls & Dustfree Rafters: How Singing Is Embodied in Sanqu and Related Texts, 1100–1400
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Guojun Wang (海角社区)
Bare Bones: The Materiality of the Forensic Body
12:45 — 2:00 LUNCH BREAK
2:00 — 3:30
Panel 3 — Transforming the Body
Chair: Griet Vankeerberghen (海角社区)
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Grace S. Fong (海角社区)
When the Body Declines: Gendered Poetics of Old Age and Aging in the Qing Era
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Ling Hon Lam (UC Berkeley)
Insectile Magnitude: The Journey to the West and Scalar Technics of the Body in Early Modern China
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Paola Zamperini (Northwestern University)
Pan Jinlian’s Dumplings: Edible Bodies in Jin Ping Mei
3:30 — 3:45 COFFEE BREAK
3:45 — 5:00
Roundtable — The Pedagogy of Embodiment
Jeehee Hong (海角社区)
Ruth Rogaski (Vanderbilt University)
Xiaorong Li (UC Santa Barbara)
Paola Zamperini (Northwestern University)
April 18
Door opens at 8:50
9:00 — 10:30
Panel 4 — Religious and Liminal Bodies
Chair: Rebecca Robinson (Université de Montréal)
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Davin Luce (海角社区)
Picturing Protection and Guidance at the Threshold: The Efficacy of the Ambiguous Body in Itinerant Monk Paintings (行腳僧圖) from Mogao Cave 17
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Mengxiao Wang (University of Southern California)
Reimagining the Sleeping Body: The “Sleep Demon” in Buddhist Texts and Ming-Qing Dramas
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Yunjing Xu (Bucknell University)
Saints’ Lives and Somatic Religious Experiences in Qing Dynasty China
10:30 — 10:45 COFFEE BREAK
10:45 — 12:45
Panel 5 — Writing the Gendered Body
Chair: Gal Gvili (海角社区)
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Maram Epstein (University of Oregon)
Transcendent Selves: Locating the True Self in Women-Authored Tanci Novels
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Xiaorong Li (UC Santa Barbara)
The Encoded Body: Intertextuality, Cultural Memory, and Ming-Qing Literati Poetry on Female Beauty
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Matthew H. Sommer (Stanford University)
Casual Sex Between Males and Hook-Up Culture in Eighteenth-Century China
●&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫;&苍产蝉辫; Baoyu Xu (Chonnam National University)
Somatic Writing and Reception Disparity: A Study of the Palace and Huajian Styles in Chinese Poetry
12:45 — 2:00 LUNCH BREAK
2:00 — 3:30
Commentary by Dorothy Ko (Barnard College)
Open discussion and next steps
Closing remarks
Organizers
For inquiries, please contact:
- Guojun Wang, 海角社区 — guojun.wang [at] mcgill.ca (guojun[dot]wang[at]mcgill[dot]ca)
- , Northwestern University — paola.zamperini [at] northwestern.edu (paola[dot]zamperini[at]northwestern[dot]edu)
Student Assistants at 海角社区
- Dan Huang, PhD student, East Asian Studies
- Yan Lang, MA student, East Asian Studies
- Kimberly Yang , MA student, East Asian Studies
- Serena Zhang, BA student, East Asian Studies