The “religions question” and the “woman question” are both central to the discourse of Chinese modernity. This talk highlights a group of elderly and illiterate rural women in southwestern China play a crucial role in shaping religious practices, ethnic identities, and local politics. Their story challenges male-dominated, textual oriented approaches to religious studies. By shifting the focus to the oral, informal, and marginalized, we place women at the center of Chinese religious life and advocate for deeper dialogues between gender and religious studies through oral history in the study of Chinese modernity.

Speaker’s Bio: 

Dr. Xiaofei Kang is Professor of History and Religion at George Washington University, USA. She holds a Ph.D. in Chinese history from Columbia University. She teaches courses on religions in East Asia, and her research focuses on gender, ethnicity, and Chinese religions in traditional and modern China. She is the author of The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2006). She co-authored (with Donald S. Sutton) Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Ethnicity, Religion and the State in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland (Brill, 2016), and co-edited (with Jia Jinhua and Ping Yao) Gendering Chinese Religion: Subject, Identity and Body (SUNY Press, 2014). Her recent book, Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in China (Oxford, 2023) examines the intertwined discourses of religion, gender and the Chinese revolution. The book has been awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Award for 2005.

This event offers a unique opportunity to broaden our perspectives on the intersection of gender and religion in China. We look forward to your participation.​