China and Inner Asia

Organized Panel Session

Rethinking East Asia through a Disability Studies Approach

This interdisciplinary and transnational panel brings together four presentations that approach modern and contemporary East Asia through a Disability Studies lens while analyzing disability in respective historical contexts. Disability Studies presumes “disability,” like “race” and “gender,” to be a socially constructed category, and examines its role in creating and reproducing social hierarchy. Considering that research on East Asia from a Disability Studies perspective is scarce, our panel brings new approaches and perspectives by illuminating how East Asian politics and culture are deeply shaped by intersections of disability, gender, imperialism, capitalism, and nationalism.

This panel begins with Hangping Xu’s examination of how Chinese writer Shi Tiesheng’s fiction debunks the legitimacy of the discourses of “humanism” as the dominant way of framing disability in the 1980s. Next, Jeong Eun Annabel We investigates short fictions by two contemporary South Korean women authors to illuminate how South Korea’s aspirations of global ascendency are paid with gendering and disabling labor. Focusing on victims of Japanese wartime sexual violence, Lin Li analyzes the dual invisibility of disabled women and disabilities resulting from sexual violence within discussions of war and disability in Japan and China. Lastly,Steve Riep analyzes Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming’s works to question a dominant narrative that excludes disabled people from depictions of the Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Organizer(s)

• LL

  Lin Li

  University of Wisconsin-Madison

Chair(s)

• TG

  Tyran Grillo

  Independent Scholar

Paper Presenter(s)

• HX

  Hangping Xu

  Middlebury College
• JW

  Jeong Eun Annabel We

  Rutgers University
• LL

  Lin Li

  University of Wisconsin-Madison
• SR

  Steven Riep

  Brigham Young University

Discussant(s)

• TG

  Tyran Grillo

  Independent Scholar

Papers:

• 9:00 AM - 10:45 AM

  Disability Euthanasia and Counter-Discourses of Humanism in Shi Tiesheng’s Early Fiction
• 9:00 AM - 10:45 AM

  When a Ghost Attains a Body: Debilities of Gendered Labor in Contemporary South Korea
• 9:00 AM - 10:45 AM

  The Invisible Disabled Women: Japan’s Wartime Sexual Violence and Postwar Japanese and Chinese Representations of Disability
• 9:00 AM - 10:45 AM

  Disability Made Concrete: Ju Ming’s War Heroes