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.

 

 

Selected Publications

Huang, Xin. (2024). “Funü: The Onion Peeling Stories”, in Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender  & Sexuality. Edited By Jamie J. Zhao, Hongwei Bao. New York: Routledge. P. 243-259.
Huang, Xin. (2023). “Writing with An Accent: Travelling Scholar and Xenophone Scholarship”, European Journal of Women’s Studies.  Vol 30, Issue 4. P455-469. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505068231207048
Huang, Xin. (2019) Funü in the Gender Legacy of the Mao Era and Contemporary Feminist Struggle in China. Wu, G. , Lansdowne, H. , & Feng, Y. (Eds). Chapter for Gender Dynamics Feminist Activism and Social Transformation in China , 15-31. London: Rutledge.
Huang, Xin. (2017) Excavating the Gendered Self: Digital Affordance and Photo-Auto|Biography. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies , 32(3), 519-539.
郭莉,黄新 译 Timothy Cheek, (2016) 邓拓:毛时代的中国文人。Deng Tuo: Chinese Intellectuals in the Mao Era. Translated by Li Guo and Xin Huang. Oxford University Press
Cheek, T. , Guo, L. , & Huang, X. (2016) Deng Tuo: Chinese Intellectuals in the Mao Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huang, Xin. (2014) In the Shadow of Suku (Speaking-bitterness): Master Scripts and Women’s Life Stories. Frontiers of the History in China , 9(4), 584-610.
Huang, Xin. (2013) From Hyperfeminine to Androgynous: Li Yuchun and the popularity of androgynous images in contemporary China. Lent, J. A., & Fitzsimmons, L. (Eds). Asian Popular Culture in Transition , 133-155. London: Routledge.
Huang, X. , Frisby, W. , & Thibault, L. (2012) Gender, Multiculturalism, and Physical Activity: the case of Chinese immigrant women. Joseph, . , Darnell, S. , & Nakamura, Y. (Eds). Race and Sport in Canada: Intersecting Inequalities , 139-164. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press .
Creese, G. , Huang, X. , Frisby, W. , & Ngene-Kamere, E. (2011) Working across race, language and culture with African and Chinese immigrant communities. Creese, G. , & Frisby, W. (Eds). Feminist Methodologies in Community Research , 116-144. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Huang, X. , Foster, K. W., Tester, F. , & Yan, M. C. (2007) Charity Development in China: An Overview. Asian Pacific Journal of Social Work and Development , 17(1), 79-94.
黄新 译,Rofel, Lisa, (2006) 另类的现代性(Other Modernities: Gender Yearning in China after Socialism.) Translated into Chinese by Xin Huang. 南京:江苏人民出版社Nanjing: Jiangsu People's Publishing House. 

UWM Land Acknowledgement: We acknowledge in Milwaukee that we are on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Menominee homeland along the southwest shores of Michigami, North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida and Mohican nations remain present.   |   To learn more, visit the Electa Quinney Institute website.