Thammasat University students are cordially invited to participate in a free Zoom book talk on Disability in Contemporary China – Citizenship, Identity and Culture.

The event is organized by Faculty of Law and Centre for Chinese Law, The University of Hong Kong (HKU).

The TU Library collection includes many books about different aspects of disability studies.

The speaker will be Professor Sarah Dauncey, Professor of Chinese Society and Disability at the Faculty of Social Sciences, the University of Nottingham, the United Kingdom.

As the event announcement notes,

Sarah Dauncey offers the first comprehensive exploration of disability and citizenship in Chinese society and culture from 1949 to the present. Through the analysis of a wide variety of Chinese sources, from film and documentary to literature and life writing, media and state documents, she sheds important new light on the ways in which disability and disabled identities have been represented and negotiated over this time. She exposes the standards against which disabled people have been held as the Chinese state has grappled with expectations of what makes the ‘ideal’ Chinese citizen. From this, she proposes an exciting new theoretical framework for understanding disabled citizenship in different societies – ‘para-citizenship’. A far more dynamic relationship of identity and belonging than previously imagined, her new reading synthesises the often troubling contradictions of citizenship for disabled people – the perils of bodily and mental difference and the potential for personal and group empowerment.

Books by Professor Dauncey are available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

The event will be held on Tuesday, 26 April 2022 at 7pm Bangkok time.

Students may register to receive a Zoom link at this link.

For further information or with any questions, please write to the following email address:

equality@hku.hk

In her recent book Disability in Contemporary China, Professor Dauncey writes:

Perhaps one of the most important things we have learned over the past fifty or so years of developing disability discourses is that words matter. In fact, they matter a lot. As long as we have had a history, words have been used to stereotype and stigmatise; but we also know that words have been used, particularly in more recent times, to empower and enable. What we are also beginning to understand is that the way disability is understood, articulated and experienced is not constant or uniform across cultures. The notion of a ‘global disability culture’, however tempting to imagine, is now being challenged by academics and activists, organisations and individuals from around the world. While the forces of globalisation are working to create greater connections and forge common goals, particularly in the area of disability rights, it is clear that historical traditions and cultural expressions, group and individual experiences, and the languages used to describe and disseminate these understandings differ widely across the globe. Not only that, we are beginning to see more clearly how these differences are not just limited to national boundaries; they may also differ based on ethnicity, gender, religion, age and a whole host of other complex factors that interact to create more local and personal responses to disability. Understanding the ways in which such knowledge about disability is produced, disseminated and received in a specific cultural context is, therefore, key to revealing new or hitherto overlooked discourses and cultures of disability and, ultimately, the complexity and heterogeneousness of disability in the world today…

Through the examination of the construction of disabled identities and citizenship from the perspective of Chinese cultural epistemologies, my research here reveals multiple understandings of what it has meant to live with impairment in China since the establishment of the People’s Republic (hereafter PRC) in 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP), but particularly since the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). It looks to establish the standards against which disabled people have been held across this period as the state itself has grappled with the expectations of the ‘ideal’ Chinese citizen. Yet, it also reveals how these standards have sometimes changed and morphed to accommodate those who did not easily fit the normative expectations for full socialist and subsequent post-socialist citizenship… Through this study of disability in China, and particularly the culture of disability in China, I propose that the current theoretical conceptions of disability and citizenship which, for the most part, posit disabled people as less-than-full citizens, sometimes overlook the instability of impairment, the agency of disabled people, the dynamism of citizenship norms and ideals, as well as the highly affective nature of particular discourses of belonging… Further to this theoretical contribution, the cultural focus of this study means that it is also, in effect, the first comprehensive empirical study of changing representations of disability in China across the modern period. As I argued in my first research article on disability in China, now well over a decade ago, the evolution of disability representation and the development of disabled identities in the post-Mao era have been some of the most dramatic, but also most overlooked, features of recent Chinese history. By the end of the Cultural Revolution, disabled people had become largely absent from film, documentary, fiction and life writing, as socialist views of the body focusing on active and useful function had effectively whitewashed images of disability from most forms of literature and culture. The only exceptions here were if the disabled body could be shown to match or, better still, exceed the ‘performance’ of the non-disabled body in the service of the communist revolution and other political imperatives of the time. By contrast, the years following 1976 saw many changes, including the formation in 1988 of the highly influential China Disabled Persons’ Federation (Zhongguo canjiren lianhehui 中国残疾人联合会; hereafter CDPF), which have permitted and even actively promoted the representation of disability. Moving forward to the second decade of the twenty-first century, we have numerous literary, cinematic and other cultural works representing an increasingly diverse range of disabled lives and with an equally wide range of impairments that have drawn on changing conceptions of disability over the past six decades or so and, in turn, contributed to the reimagining of disabled identities and disabled citizenship. Despite this, there is relatively little work on disability, culture and identity in China in either English or Chinese, and there are no studies as yet that look at his issue from a citizenship perspective. This forms a stark contrast to the wealth of research on such aspects of disability in Europe, North America and Australia, areas that are now often referred to as the ‘global North’. This work is, therefore, highly timely because we are at a juncture where there is an urgent need to address the fundamental problem caused by applying theories – which may be founded in sociological, cultural studies or disability studies traditions – that have been developed in these Western or Anglophone contexts directly to China or other societies.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)