Professor Ko’s research interest is the everyday lives of women in China –along with the domestic objects they made by hand–as a significant part of country’s cultural, economic and political development. She works at the intersections of anthropology, history, and women’s studies.
Ko’s recent book, Cinderella Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, published in 2005, shattered the popular conception of footbinding as a tool to oppress women and demonstrated that it was instead a source of female identity, purpose, pride, and power. It won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association, Recently, she has been turning her attention to the skills of women’s artisans such as embroiderers, stone carvers, and ceramic artists. Her research during spring semester, 2004, as a senior fellow at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center’s Institute for International Research in Nanjing, focused on the importance of ancient art of silk-weaving for a study of the dress-making tradition and domestic work culture in China’s silk industry region. More recently, as a fellow at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, England, in spring 2007, she researched ancient swordsmith legends for insights into the relations between bodily investments and transformation of matter.
In addition to Cinderella’s Sisters, Ko has written numerous books and publications, including “Between the Boudoir and the Global Market: Shen Shou, Embroidery and Modernity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Looking Modern (forthcoming), Every Step a Lotus (2001), and Teachers of the Inner Chambers (1994). She is also co-editor of Women and Confucian Cultures in Pre-modern China, Korea, and Japan.
Ko’s courses include Chinese cultural history, body histories, women and culture in 17th century China, and Confucian cultures.
Ko earned undergraduate and advanced degrees at Stanford University, including the doctorate. She has received a number of fellowships and awards. She was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (2000-2001), a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2000-2001) and a fellow at the Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University (1999-2000). Before joining the Barnard faculty in 2001, Professor Ko taught at Rutgers University.
Rejecting popular image and accepted scholarship on the status of women in premodern China, this pathbreaking work argues that literate gentrywomen in seventeenth-century Jiangnan were far from oppressed or silenced. As writers, readers, editors, and teachers, these women created a rich culture and meaningful existence from within the constraints of the male-dominated Confucian system. The author reconstructs the social, emotional, and intellectual worlds of these women from the interstices between ideology, practice, and self-perception. Born out of curiosity about how premodern Chinese women lived, this book proposes a new way to conceptualize China's past. This reconception rests on the premise that by understanding how women lived, we better grasp the dynamics of gender relations and gain a more complete knowledge of the values of Chinese culture, the functioning of Chinese society, and the nature of historical change. The book examines three types of women's communities that developed in this environment: domestic, social, and public. Women from different families, age groups, and social stations were brought together by their shared love of poetry and common concerns as women. Though important at the time, most of these ties proved fragile and transitory because of women's inherently ambivalent position. The author argues that the gender system identified women both by their shared gender, or women-as-same, and by their social station, or women-as-different. This contradiction accorded women freedoms within their own limited spheres, but these spheres were fragmented and often demarcated by the class of male kin. As a result, even the most mobile and articulate of women had noinstitutional means of launching fundamental attacks on the gender system.
「闺塾师」中,最让我印象深刻的莫过于「牡丹亭」。那是明代大匠汤显祖的作品。其实从未完整或深刻地去品读这部作品,在有机会认真读文学的时候,我更心向往于那些慷慨激昂或沉稳道来的奏折,对这部剧本的印象也不过停留在执拗的杜丽娘,或是那句“原来姹紫嫣红开遍,似这...
評分牡丹亭一节很好看。原来红楼梦与牡丹亭有这样一种内在联系:情。原来情是对道德和阶级的解构,是一种平等意识。(想起来西方对中世纪骑士之爱的解读)。 知道了一些明清之际中上层知识女性的生活。我一直对古代女性挺好奇的:她们可以走出家门吗?她们可以有经济来源吗?她们真...
評分第一遍看:这都是什么乱七八糟的 第二遍看:好像有点道理 第三遍看:每句话都有特别的涵义 1、很多人纠结,为什么题目是闺塾师,而写的却不是闺塾师?作者已经在文章中阐述了其中的原因: “所有出现在本书中的女性,无论是妻子、女儿或寡妇,都通过她们的作品,互相讲授着各自...
評分有时候一个问题就是开启一个崭新世界的钥匙。 读《闺塾师——明末清初江南的才女文化》时,高彦颐的一个发问就令我觉得惊异:“儒家的社会性别体系为何在如此长的时间内运转得这样灵活顺畅?妇女们从这一体系中获得过什么好处?”这一发问是对五四史观的颠覆。因为五四史观...
評分几个月前读《再生缘》,看到孟丽君花烛潜逃之前,自写真容,中有一句“湘裙半舞见金莲”。自写真容无疑是从《牡丹亭》里杜丽娘那儿衍化出来,而在遮蔽物下微微露出的小脚这个意象在前人的描写里更为常见。《香莲品藻》里提到的小脚的三上三中三下九种好处,这“三下”就是帘下...
Insightful, with respect to humanity.
评分唉。。其實我的興趣就在性彆史,可為什麼我一直在寫民族主義的論文。。
评分對五四史觀的挑戰
评分經濟角度看明清女性角色多樣化發展
评分最有意思的兩個概念是“the floating world” and "the cult of qing"..最弱的是對gender/class intersectionality的分析..
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