Welcome to the Collective on Gender, Religion and the Arts of Asia!
Our purpose is to facilitate the interchange of ideas across these three disciplines with respect to issues like the visual representation of gender, women and their role in artmaking, and the status of the body in the history of Asian art. To this end, we intend to organize regular meetings in the form of conferences and workshops in order to share and keep pace with scholarly contributions in these lively fields. We hosted our inaugural conference on Zoom in June 2023, a two-day event entitled “Gender and Buddhist Art in Asia: Embodiment, Patronage and the Sacred.” Please find additional information on this first conference event here. As an open collective, we invite all students, researchers, and other interested persons to join and participate in future programming initiatives!
The Collective is pleased to announce our conference theme for Spring 2024: Gender and the Environment. The “environment” is broadly defined, encompassing realms from the earthly to the lived and imagined. How then might disciplinary norms be further challenged if ecofeminism were mobilized in the study of the material cultures of Asia and an ecological or ecocritical method employed to consider the relationship between gender, the environment, and visual material? This conference aspires to facilitate conversations around the study of these relationships in pre-modern and modern contexts by exploring themes like ecocriticism, zoocriticism, trans-corporeality, new materialisms, matter, urban theory, and placeness.
We invite all interested persons to register for the presentations on both the April 06 and April 07 dates. More information can be found here about conference schedule and the panels.