Book talk: Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China, Jia Tan

The Gender Institute and the Mlitt in Gender Studies (Graduate School of Interdisciplinary studies), invites you to the book presentation of Digital Masquerade. 

Jia Tan is a Global Fellow at the University of St Andrews. 

Digital Masquerade offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital media, feminist and queer culture, and rights consciousness in China. Jia Tan examines the formation of what she calls “rights feminism,” or the emergence of rights consciousness in Chinese feminist formations, as well as queer activism and rights advocacy. Expanding on feminist and queer theory of masquerade, she develops the notion of “digital masquerade” to theorize the co-constitutive role of digital technology as assemblage and entanglement in the articulation of feminism, queerness, and rights. Drawing from interviews with various feminist and queer media practitioners, participant observation at community events, and detailed analyses of a variety of media forms such as social media, electronic journals, digital filmmaking, film festivals, and dating app videos, Jia Tan captures the feminist, queer, and rights articulations that are simultaneously disruptive of and conditioned by state censorship, technological affordances, and dominant social norms.

Jia TAN is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her doctoral degree in critical studies of cinema and television from the University of Southern California. She is the author of Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (New York University Press, 2013). Her research has been funded by Hong Kong Research Grants Council, Social Science Research Council, Harold Lloyd Foundation, and so on. She is on the editorial board of Communication, Culture, and Critique as well as Journal of Chinese Cinemas.