Disability in Asian Studies: Intersections of Disability in Sinophone Cultures
Thursday, March 6th, 2025 from 1:00-3:00 pm ET
Virtual Event via Zoom
About the event:
Professor Hangping Xu will discuss his research on disabled figures in CCP literature. In the 1950s when China broke away from its ideological tie to the Soviet Union, the CCP authorities promoted Wu Yunduo as “China’s Pavel” to replace the bed-ridden, blind protagonist of the Russian novel How the Steel was Tempered, who had already become the revolutionary hero in the Chinese imagination. Wu wrote an autobiography entitled Devoting Everything to the Party (ba yiqie xiangei dang; 1953), in which he chronicles how he ultimately makes himself disabled by experimenting with dynamite for military use. Wu risked his life to test out and manufacture weapons for the New Fourth Army’s arsenal. He lost his left eye and left leg, destroyed four fingers and had built numerous metal bits into his body. Both Wu and Pavel are imagined as what Disability Studies scholars call “super-crip.” Their political, or even spiritual, arrival at the hegemonic cultural mandates of revolutionary ideology overcompensates the otherwise unbearable pains of their corporeal being. Their health and bodily integrity deteriorate as their revolutionary spirit towers above their tangible corporality. This presentation offers a critical reading of Wu’s autobiography with a comparative look at Pavel and with a contextualization of the period. Professor Hangping Xu will argue that disability functions as an aesthetic foil with which to imagine the superhuman revolutionary subject, concretizing the ideological fantasy of the invincible national body politic. The revolutionary body is not only perfect, grand, and tall; beautifully disabled, it also transcends the biological limits of the flesh.
In this session, Dr. Carmen Yau will also talk about the intersectionality of disabled women in Chinese communities. She will start by sharing her work on domestic and partner violence against disabled women. She will further explore the agency of disabled women to navigate abusive relationships. She will also share her recent work on a photovoice to unearth the story of disabled women being carers, which facilitates policy change to recognize the entitlement and welfare for disabled carers.
About the Speakers
Hangping Xu is Assistant Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include modern Chinese literature, film and media studies, queer and crip studies, and theories of world literature. His first book project examines disability politics and aesthetics in modern Chinese culture. His articles have appeared in such venues as Chinese Literature Today, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, A Cambridge Global History of Literature and the Environment, Queer Literature in the Sinosphere, and Prism: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. He co-edited a special issue, Translatability and Transmediality: Chinese Poetry in/and the World, for the journal Prism: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.
Carmen Yau is a full-time Lecturer in Social Work and the Lead of Wellbeing Research Unit in the Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a certified sexuality educator. She is also a Mental Health First Aid Champion awarded by the MHFA England. Carmen is a multi-award-winning advocate in the community of the disabled. In 2024, she won the Disability 100 as the most influential disabled individual in the UK. In 2021, she was nominated for UN Women’s Rise and Raise Others Award as an acknowledgement of achievements that she has made supporting and inspiring women and girls all over the world. In 2020, She was the third-place winner in Tatler’s Hot List of “Sixteen Women Fighting for Fairness in Asia”.
