We invite proposals for our panel titled "Health in Visual and Transmedia Storytelling: Gender Norms, Cultural Embodiments, and Medical Techniques in Modern China," to be presented at the AAS 2026 Annual Meeting. The panel currently includes two presenters and is seeking two additional presenters and possibly one discussant to join the conversation.
Panel introduction:
Health has been a contested field of state regulation and individual negotiation in the history of modern China. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, medicine has been closely intertwined with the process of Chinese modernity as traditional Chinese medicine had to be confronted with the coming of modern western medical science. Experiments and treatment of medical education and public health regulation shaped the modern governance of the Nationalist Party in wartime China. During the Cold War, both the KMT and the Communist Party constructed medical infrastructures that not only manufactured advanced medical technologies but also aimed to export medical knowledge globally to exert international influences. As China is becoming an increasingly important agent in global technological innovation since the end of the Cold War, Chinese medical technologies have acquired global attention and invited scholarly inquiries, research, and debates. To retrieve the individual agencies and cultural negotiations embodied in the history of medical technologies and the politics of public health in modern China, this panel examines how narratives in literature, art, film, and other media reflect, challenge, and reshape understanding of health practices, gender norms, and cultural embodiments. Potential papers that this panel is interested in investigate the following themes:
- The interaction among the state infrastructure, medical technologies, and individual agencies;
- Medical knowledge and practices that embody audiovisual and performative negotiations and transmedia narratives of visual art;
- Cases and issues concerning biopolitics, gender norms, and medical humanities;
- Translation, knowledge production, and medical practices across multiple cultures;
- Science fiction, medical technologies, and ethics of pharmaceutical production;
- Diaspora, Chinese medical practitioners, and medicine in motion in global China and Sinophone communities.
Please submit an abstract (300-350 words) and a brief bio by 29th July. All proposals should be sent by email to x.hou@wustl.edu and junny_lxy@163.com
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Xiaohan Hou
Washington University in St. Louis
x.hou@wustl.edu
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