Thursday November 27, 5:00-6:15pm, Lib 2115
Speaker: Professor Ziying Cui, Visiting Lecturer of Dance at DKU
In 2015, Huawei shocked the world with a striking advertisement: a ballerina’s foot, one perfectly poised in a satin shoe, the other bruised and bleeding beneath its bandages. For Huawei’s founder, this tortured foot symbolized both “pain and happiness” on the path to global success—a metaphor eagerly taken up by Chinese media to reflect the nation’s rise. But why does the battered female ballet body carry such power in the Chinese imagination
By unpacking this uneasy fusion of Western cultural aesthetics and Chinese ideals of femininity, I argue that the Chinese female ballet body emerges as a powerful but contested figure—one that both reveals and obscures the tensions between beauty, suffering, gendered oppression, and national pride.
Snacks and drinks will be provided.
This talk is co-sponsored by AHI and the Center for the Study of Contemporary China.
