ARTH 417
Gender Construction in Chinese Art Spring 2010
Division I Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
This is not the current course catalog

“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman”–Simone de Beauvior This course will investigate how gender as a cultural and social construction is visualized in Chinese art. Issues of interest include how gendered space is constructed in Chinese painting; how landscape paintings can be decoded as masculine or feminine; and ways in which images of women help construct ideas of both femininity and masculinity. This course will also discuss Confucian literati’s deals] [of] reclusion and homsociality; didactic art for women; images of concubines, courtesans; and lonely women’s isolation and abandonment. For example, while nature is often seen as feminine, Chinese landscape painting may be coded as masculine due to its association with the Confucian scholar’ ideals of eremitism, a means for the cultivation of the mind, and homosociality. On the other hand, the placement of a masculine landscape in feminine space may be seen as rhetorical strategy, accentuating the lonely woman’sisolation and abandonment, which are important tropes in Chinese erotic poetry as well. This course fulfills the EDI requirement in that it is designed to enable students to study the logic of gender and sexuality in a context different from their own; to see how both genders are constructed in relation to each other, and how they interact in the context of class, ideology, politics, and ideals, as well as how we may compare their representation in China with those of other cultures, notably Japan and the West. Using both visual art and literature, this course also challenges the gender stereotyping that still exists in current scholarship.