Speaker: Paola Zamperini, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, Northwestern University - Academia.edu, Knowledge Commons

Abstract: »As a scholar and teacher of gender and sexuality studies, Paola Zamperini has been researching for decades literary accounts of sexual violence, rape, and grooming in premodern and modern and contemporary Chinese literature. Driven by the desire to engage her students productively with and around these ever-relevant issues, she has brought them to the 21st century Euromerican classroom. With the recent publication of the English translation of Lin Yi-Han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise, the pedagogical horizons and possibilities of her endeavors have expanded in profound ways, given the crucial importance this novel has played ever since its publication in 2017 for the #Metoo movements in Taiwan, the PRC and the Sinosphere. Zamperini first explores the pedagogical challenges brought by a female-authored novel like Yin Yihan’s that spares no details in terms of the physical, emotional and psychological violence resulting from grooming, rape, and domestic abuse. At the same time, weaving her experience in teaching the ways in which literature deploys the representation of gendered and sexual violence, Zamperini also focuses on the opportunities for empowerment within and outside the classroom that arise when an author of Lin Yihan’s talent creates a narrative that destabilizes conventional sexploitative approaches. First Love Paradise offers epistemologies that, by exposing the societal and cultural mechanisms that are deployed to rationalize and enable older men to sexually predate children and young people, grant its readers a literary, affective, and cultural vocabulary to expose and thus resist such abuses.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of China / History of Taiwan (1945–present) | Fiction: Fictional victims of sexual assault | Literature: Taiwanese literature / Lin Yi-han, Fang Siqi’s Legal Paradise | Sex and the law: Sexual Assault