
- huang32@uwm.edu
- Curtin Hall 525
- Pronoun Indifferent
- CV
Xin Huang
- Associate Professor, Department Chair, Women's & Gender Studies
Education
- PhD, Women’s Studies and Gender Relations, University of British Columbia, Canada
- MA, Women, Gender and Development, Institute of Social Studies, The Netherlands
- MA, Library Science, Peking University, China
- BA. Fashion Design, Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, China
- BA, Library Science, Peking University, China
Office Hours
Monday 11:00-4:30pm, virtual
Tuesday 11:30-2:00 In-person
Thursday 11:30-4:30 in person
Friday 11:00-4:30pm virtual
Teaching Schedule
Course Num | Title | Meets |
---|---|---|
WGS 500-001 | Advanced Social Science Seminar in Women's and Gender Studies: Gender, Sexuality, and Photography | T 2:30pm-5:10pm |
WGS 500G-001 | Advanced Social Science Seminar in Women's and Gender Studies: Gender, Sexuality, and Photography | T 2:30pm-5:10pm |
Courses Taught
- WGS 799 Gender, Sexulaity, and Photography
- WGS 710 Advanced Feminist Theory
- WGS 700 Feminist Issues and Scholarship
- WGS 500 Gender in Global Asia
- WGS 411 Feminist Research Method
- WGS 410 Feminist Theory
- WGS 302 Gendered Bodies: Body Politics and Cross-Cultural Perspectives
- WGS 200 Introduction to Women’s Studies
Research Interests
Gender, Oral and Visual Life Narrative: I write about the transformation of ideas regarding gender and sexuality in the Mao and post-Mao eras, by archiving and analyzing oral and photo life narratives. My book, The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era (SUNY Press, 2018), explores how the gender legacy of the Mao era manifests in contemporary Chinese women's lives. Currently, I am working on a manuscript titled Photo Crafted Self: Gender and Photo Life Narrative, which examines the visual and bodily construction of gendered self in photo life narratives (PLN). I reflect on how different photographic technologies, development processes, materiality of deliverables, and methods of circulation, transmission, and archiving interact with the historical transformation of gender, and how PLN provides opportunities to contest and transform dominant scripts of gender and history.
Gender, Reproductive Justic, and Necropolitics: My new research project "Gender and Sexual Politics in the One-Child Generation" examines the structural and theoretical relationship between the One-child generation and their origin story, the ‘missing girls,’ by situating the “missing” within the violent “surplussing” of populations in post-socialist China and the construction of global “other” (non)subjects. It explores the interweaving of biopolitics and necropolitics in the “twin pillars” of China’s “modernization” project: economic development and population control. The project also contemplates how the “missing” predict the precarity of the remaining, and argues that the specter of the “missing” brought about the gender and sexual un/alignment, mix-matching, mis-matching in the O-generation that disrupting and transforming the patriarchal hetero cistem, and opens pathways to alternative imagination of the future.
Language and Knowledge Construction: As a translator and scholar writing about China in English, I have been reflecting on my intellectual journey as a travelling feminist scholar, and the linguistic politics in feminist knowledge construction and circulation. In my recent article “Writing With An Accent: Xenophone Scholars and Feminist Knowledge Construction”, I demonstrate that moving in-between languages and intellectual traditions, the accented writings produced by travelling scholars can serve as important modes and foci of feminist knowledge production and have the potential to produce “xenophone” scholarship that contributes to and transform feminist knowledge production. In a new book chapter “Funü: The Onion Peeling Stories”, I unpeel the multiple layers of the women’s liberation project of the Mao era, and showed that lesbians have been the familiar strangers of funü whose “comradeship” needs to be recognized, and that a queer engagement would contribute to the critical assessment and future development of Chinese socialist feminisms. The chapter also exposes the Euro-American centralism in feminist theory building and curriculum, traces the exchange, translation, and transplantation of feminist ideas between China and aboard.