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Wednesday, 6 March 2019 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM EST
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FCWSRC Works in Progress Faculty Seminar
“Querying 'China-in-Africa': Gender, Sexuality, and Interracial Intimacies"
Mingwei Huang, Mellon Faculty Fellow, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Dartmouth College
As Chinese commodities, infrastructure, and communities expand across the African continent, the mainstream “China-in-Africa” story unfolds as a tale of 21st century neocolonialism. Gender and sexuality animate geopolitical imaginaries yet are rarely examined. Drawing from the analysis of popular texts and extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Johannesburg, this paper theorizes how gender, sexuality, and race mediate representations of China-Africa, and also everyday encounters between Chinese and African actors as new China-Africa flows engender normalizing projects. As this paper argues, the color line of Chinese capital and African labor relies on the daily reproduction of racial boundaries between Chinese and African bodies. These boundaries acutely manifest around interracial desire and anti-miscegenation logics. And yet they are inevitably porous through the public intimacies of exchanging money, sharing toilets, and rubbing up in narrow aisles and cramped warehouses, and the realities of African domestic labor in Chinese households. As is shown, the geopolitics of China-Africa are intimately bound to gender and racialized sexuality.
Mingwei Huang is a Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Dartmouth College, where she will transition to Assistant Professor in 2020. At the University of Minnesota, she received a PhD in American Studies with a minor in Feminist and Critical Sexuality Studies. She is working on her book The Intimacies of Racial Capitalism, an ethnography of Chinese migration in South Africa. She has published and has forthcoming work in Scholar & Feminist Online, Radical History Review, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Anthropology News, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Discussants: Kiran Asher (Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, UMass Amherst) and Laura Briggs (Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, UMass Amherst)
The Five College Women's Studies Research Center initiates and supports collaborative projects dedicated to engaged, critical feminist scholarship from diverse perspectives. With an emphasis on emerging fields in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in all disciplines, the Center also provides a forum in which faculty and graduate students in the Five Colleges, visiting scholars at all ranks from around the world, and partner organizations can present their work.
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