Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies

A Symposium with Professor Zhen Zhang (Director, Asian Film & Media Studies, New York University), in conjunction with the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art exhibit “She/Her/Hers: Women in the Arts of China.”

Thursday, April 14 at 6:00-9;00 pm in the Harn Museum : Screening of Jasmine Lee Ching Hui’s film “Money and Honey” (2012), with Introduction by Zhen Zhang and a discussion with the director (online).

Friday, April 15 at 12:00-1:45pm (Library East, Smathers 100):  a presentation by guest speaker Zhen Zhang titled “Women make Waves in Sinophone Cinemas.”  Drawing from her current book project, Women Make Waves in Sinophone Cinemas, this talk situates Taiwan documentary filmmaker Jasmine Ching-hui Lee’s critically and popularly acclaimed Money and Honey (2012) about her friendship and filmmaking praxis with several female Philippine workers in a Taipei nursing home and their homeland, within the context of her extended “women and homeland” documentary series. A strong instance of the “sentimental” strand in Taiwan’s new documentary, the decade-long trans-Asian project harnesses the power of melodramatic impulses for changing public attitudes, influencing government policies on immigrant labor.

he talk will be followed by an interdisciplinary panel discussion of the symposium theme and Q&A with the audience including Professors Will Hasty (LLC-German); Aida Hozic (Political Science), Barbara Mennel (Rothman Chair and Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere), Churchill Roberts (Media Production, Management, and Technology), and Welson Tremura (Associate Director of the Center for Arts, Migration and Entrepreneurship).

Moderator: Ying Xiao (LLC-Chinese).

SONGS Livestream Link for Remote Participants: https://mediasite.video.ufl.edu/Mediasite/Play/f51edab0bb77474eaa8fee9d3d73a5b51d

Zhen Zhang is Associate Professor and founding Director of the Asian Film & Media Initiative at New York University. Her main areas of scholarly interest include Chinese-language film history in its cultural, aesthetic, political, and gendered manifestations, within the broad frameworks of modernity, modernism, and cosmopolitanism. Her first scholarly book, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896-1937 (2005), articulates a cultural history of early Chinese cinema within the matrix of exuberant metropolitan mass culture in the early decades of the twentieth century. The interest in the dynamic relationship between the cinema and the city is also evident in her edited volume, The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (2007). Professor Zhen has also been following and working on and with emerging independent film communities in China, especially in the advent of digital media. This long-term engagement has resulted in DV-made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film (co-edited with Angela Zito) published in 2015. Her ongoing projects include a volume on women directors of contemporary Chinese-language cinema and another book on the orphan imagination in transnational Chinese film history.

This event is cosponsored by UF’s Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research and the University of Florida International Center.

Click on this link for more information.