Project description
The struggle and survival of Chinese women writers
In the mid-20th century, Chinese women writers faced political and personal struggles under Mao’s regime. Their stories reveal the pain of their lived experiences. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the EMBODIMENT project delves into these often-neglected narratives, focusing on life writings by women who were cultural figures before 1949 and endured suffering during the political upheavals of the 1950s. Through the works of writers like Mei Zhi and Ding Ling, the project examines how these women used life writing to process and articulate their pain. Drawing on gender studies, memory theories, and pain studies, it uncovers the ways these texts challenge traditional views of compliance, resistance, and survival in authoritarian contexts.
Objective
This project explores Chinese women writers’ articulations and recollections of pain from the 1950s through the 1980s. The focus is on heretofore neglected or understudied life writing by women who had become established cultural workers before the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and had witnessed or suffered punishment in the mid- or late 1950s. Mei Zhi’s (1914-2004) account of her husband Hu Feng’s political exile in Sichuan and Ding Ling’s (1904-1986) memories of her experience at a labor camp in Beidahuang, Manchuria, are a few examples of women writers’ personal narratives of Mao-era suffering, and among the key texts that this project intends to analyze. Traditionally marginalized within Chinese literary histories and canons, these texts offer a unique entry point into how Chinese women have brought life writing to bear on experiences of suffering. Drawing on literary and gender studies, memory theories, pain studies, and histories of emotions, senses, and experience, this project highlights the potential of these texts for rethinking the place of the female body in life writing that stems from or evokes authoritarian and disciplinary contexts. In historicizing these women writers’ embodied articulations and recollections of pain, this project adopts an interdisciplinary methodology centered on the notion of affective experience to reveal the dynamic relationship between context, lived experience, and writing. This relational model will draw attention to women’s creative strategies of negotiation and survival from within the system, beyond clear-cut divisions between compliance and resistance under duress. Finally, by attending to a wide range of emotions and solidarities that can grow out of pain situations, this project will unravel the therapeutic potential and the limits of life writing, with far-reaching implications in the interdisciplinary fields of gender studies, pain studies, and medical humanities, as well as in society at large.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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10120 Tallinn
Estonia
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.