Salome, a classic figure in Western literature, was introduced to China in 1915 with Oscar Wilde's famous play Salome, and has widely influenced and been discussed in China in the following three decades. Although the Chinese imagination of "Salome" was initially formed through Wilde's play, since the mid-to-late 20s of the 20th century, "Salome" has gradually become independent of the script with the interpretation and reinterpretation of the Chinese people, and has acquired a different meaning from that of it in the West. Specifically, the word "Salome" was frequently used in newspapers, personal letters, and diaries of the time to symbolize a certain intense emotion. The yearning or criticism of this fierce emotion is, to a certain extent, the product of the discussion of the "conflict between soul and flesh" in the later period of the New Culture Movement. In the 1930s, Salome-like passions overflowed the scope of literature, leading to the occurrence of murder-for-loves and the public's abnormal sympathy for the killers, which eventually led to the stigmatization of the image of "Salome".

The purpose of this paper is to take the transformation of the image of "Salome" as an example to get a glimpse of the changes in the emotional status of individualism in modern times. To this end, this paper first briefly reviews the discussion of "spirit and flesh" around "Salome" in the 30 years of the Republic of China; It then focuses on the reshaping and use of Salome's image by Zhang Jingsheng and his friends Huang Tianpeng Hualin from the mid-to-late 1920s to the early 1930s, illustrating how the once-popular "spirit and body" debate advanced and came to an end.

As an American author of short stories, novels and essays, Pam Houston is best known for her first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness, exploring love and gender in the American West landscape.This paper examines Pam Houston's Cowboys Are My Weakness, exploring the intricate relationship between landscape and feminist desire, and analyzing the expression of female body desire in the specific context of the American western wilderness. Through detailed landscape writing, Houston transforms the wilderness into a unique space for female desire and self-exploration. The wilderness, with its primal and untamed qualities, symbolizes animalistic instincts and a spirit of adventure. It serves not merely as a backdrop but as a metaphor for female desire, granting female characters the freedom to reconnect with their instincts and candidly embrace their desires. By depicting landscape, Houston liberates women from the stereotypical roles assigned to them in traditional western literature, transforming them into agents actively exploring themselves and expressing their desires. In her narrative, landscape embodies the powers of redemption and adventure. Through physical and emotional exploration in the wilderness, female characters break free from societal expectations, demonstrating independence and agency. Landscape thus becomes crucial medium for women to pursue freedom and reshape their identities.

Paul Schilder combining psychological attitudes with physical and sociocultural perceptions defined body image as the depiction of one’s own body in the mind of the individual. Gerald Corey identified body image as how individuals perceive their own bodies and how they perceive others’ evaluations of their bodies. Body image begins to form in early childhood and is a dynamic process that is influenced by both society and the individual. From the social perspective, the sociocultural context in which an individual lives will influence his or her experience and view of his or her own body. From the individual perspective, gender, sexual orientation and family will also have a profound impact on body image. Although there is no lack of homosexuality literature works in ancient Chinese literature, they are mainly about male homosexuality (Nanfeng), while the writings of female homosexuality are only a sporadic and vague existence. Li Yu, a dramatist and novelist in the late Ming and the early Qing periods, wrote the first female homosexuality saga, Lian Xiangban (Pitying the Fragrant and Companion), which began the process of female sexual minorities theme writing in Chinese literature, which experienced two peak periods of rapid development. The first period of rapid development was at the beginning of the 20th century, a series of new literary novels embodying the theme of female sexual minorities was created by the writers, who influenced by the May Fourth Movement, represented by Ding Ling’s In the Summer Vacation, Lu Yin’s The Diary of Lishi, Ling Shuhua’s There is Something, and Yu Dafu’s She Is a Weak Woman. The second is a series of works produced by female writers in the 1990s, including Chen Ran’s A Private Life, Lin Bai’s Water in a Bottle, Liu Xihong’s You Can't Change Me, Yan Geling’s The White Snake and The White Sparrow, and Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre. Through the body image writing of female sexual minorities, it can be seen that female homosexuality theme in Chinese literature has shown a change from criticizing the times to focusing on the individual: writers bred under the literary parent body of the May Fourth Movement placed their works in a realistic social and historical context, judging the persecution of women by the patriarchy, calling for women’s awakening, and attempting to transform the historically defined gender roles, but with the symbolization of the May Fourth Spirit the writing on female sexual minorities during this period also contained an idealized or symbolized character. The “feminine writing” that began in the 1980s became one of the most prominent phenomena in Chinese literature in the 1990s. The works of this period were not limited to a specific social context, but rather shifted to revealing the individual social roles that dictate and force women's survival and psychological patterns, and to showing the struggle of individuals under the discourse system of the Other.

In science fiction writer Sakyo Komatsu's works before 1970, women are mostly depicted as the social and animalistic "mother,” the former healing men's emotional traumas and the latter giving birth. In response to criticism portraying women as this single archetype, Komatsu wrote the “Women’s Series” in early 1970s. In these works, there is an obvious shift in narrative where he dedicates them towards using the concept of space and body deformation as a basis for women to resist patriarchal oppression and construct their own field of discourse. Firstly, he uses the theme of travel for women to escape the constraints of the domestic space. Secondly, he uses body deformation to subvert the male gaze. Lastly, he attempts to construct transcendental space outside the real space and the imaginary space, which becomes women’s “other world,” isekai. However, because male writers’ portrayal of women is mostly based on their own experience in patriarchal society, the real space of the male perspective and the imaginary space of men cannot create women’s isekai. This limitation undermines Komatsu’s attempt to construct an isekai for women. In “Autumn Women,” the protagonist witnesses the gathering of 4 women, symbolizing Komatsu as an onlooker leaving construction of women's isekai unfinished and handing it over to women themselves.

In the later 1970s, with links to Komatsu’s attempt, a group of female science fiction writers emerged in Japan who carried on the use of body deformation and construction of their own isekai, in an attempt to subvert and change the world. These authors included Izumi Suzuki, author of "Women and Women," Moto Hagio, author of "Star Red," and Mariko Ohara, author of "Hybrid Child." In their works, their use of body deformation shows their strong desire to change the female body, while at the same time laments that it is only through these transformations that women can survive. The rise of women’s science fiction brings societal attention to the phenomenon of sexual differences, but intensifies the confrontation between the sexes.

Facing this growing contention, Komatsu opens new exploration of gender awareness in his final novel, “The Corridor of Nothingness (2000).” The protagonist of this novel, AE, is an intelligent robot of an unspecified gender. In order to improve efficiency of space exploration, multiple "sub-personalities" were created inside it, including both masculine and feminine. When AE communicated with extraterrestrial intelligent life, it reflected on itself and asked, "After all, in this universe, what is the meaning of the gender differences between 'male' and 'female'?" Through this reflection, Komatsu ponders the significance of gender in the universe and attempts to dissolve the binary nature of gender. Unfortunately, his answer is inconclusive as the work remains unfinished, with this question left for further exploration by future generations.

In recent years, with the ongoing development of body studies and feminism, the focus of female body representation in American literature has shifted from earlier discussions of aesthetics, desire, and morality to an exploration of women’s social conditions and identity. This shift from the objectification of the female body to its subjectivity is particularly evident in depictions of female bodily disorders, such as in Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2015). Bodily disorders refer to conditions that affect the normal functioning of the body, often leading to a deterioration of physical health or abnormal behaviors. These can include chronic illnesses, physical deformities, and psychological conditions that manifest physically, such as eating disorders or somatic symptom disorders. In the book Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Gay recounts the sexual violence she experienced in her youth and how it shaped her perception of her body. She describes how binge eating became a coping mechanism for processing trauma, pain, and inner conflict. The body and food in the book serve as tools for both self-protection and self-destruction. Gay addresses issues such as obesity, binge eating, and body shaming, presenting complex reflections on the female body, especially how to navigate self-identity in a society that upholds thinness and an “ideal” female body. She proposes a more inclusive understanding of the body, emphasizing that the body is not merely a standard of beauty but a symbol of personal experience, pain, and resistance. The female body is no longer just an object of societal gaze; it becomes a means of resisting external judgments and self-harm. In novels that focus on female bodily disorders, authors explore the relationship between the body and women within the contexts of gender, illness, and body standards, presenting the interconnections of health, disease, gender violence, and female identity. These kind of works delve into the limitations of the body, the healthcare system, and the tensions between women’s self-identity and societal expectations. This study will examine how contemporary American authors portray women’s bodies in the context of bodily disorders form the perspectives of feminist and body politics. It will examine how women perceive their bodies from a subjective standpoint, how they challenge gender roles, family norms, and societal expectations through bodily control, and analyze the forms of bodily autonomy and their relationship with social and political forces.

Throughout the history of literature, prostitutes have always been significant and unique presence. While men enjoy the pleasures that the bodies of prostitutes bring, they often condemn and disdain them morally. The body of the prostitute seems to serve only as a tool for male pleasure, and tragedy becomes their inevitable fate. Yan Lianke, one of the most internationally influential contemporary Chinese writers, has created a series of prostitute images and bodies in his novels such as The Explosion Chronicles, Feng Ya Song, and Riguang Liunian, which reflect the ordinary lives of rural people. These novels present both ancient prostitutes who emphasize their bodily skills and talents, and modern young women in the process of urbanization who willingly sell their bodies. In Yan Lianke’s works, the bodies of prostitutes are often intertwined with adornment, money, power, and disease, transforming them into social, moral, and political bodies. Specifically, in order to gain male favor and secure wealth or power, prostitutes often choose fashionable, trendy, and distinctive bodily adornments. Such adornments serve as critical tools for attracting and pleasing men. Furthermore, the potential for bodily adornments to enable a transcendence of class boundaries leads these women to become increasingly invested in and attentive to their physical presentation. Meanwhile, modern young women who sell their bodies for their fathers, lovers, money, or power do not feel ashamed. Instead, they become in the pleasures of money, power, and physical indulgence. In Yan Lianke’s works, the bodies of prostitutes serve not only as a medium for reflecting the cultural and social ethos of the times but also as a site for profound social critique and critical reflection.

As one of the most renowned novelists from Hong Kong, Li Bihua excels in depicting turbulent love stories through a distinctly female perspective. In Sheng Si Qiao, while narrating the emotional entanglements between Dandan, Huaiyu, and Zhigao amidst a chaotic era, Li also creates a series of compelling female characters and vividly portrays various female bodies. The women in the novel, such as the performer Dandan, the movie star Duan Pinting, and the prostitute Honglian, adopt different forms of bodily adornment based on their age, identity, social status, and profession. These bodily adornments not only fulfill their primary functions, such as providing warmth or covering shame, but also serve as vital mediums for women to showcase their personal allure. Furthermore, the descriptions of bodily ornamentation are significant literary devices for shaping character personalities and enhancing character development. They emphasize the female body, enrich female imagery, and propel the narrative forward. In Li Bihua's writing, female bodily ornamentation transcends its physical purpose, becoming a visual, aesthetic, and literary symbol. It encapsulates women’s self-worth and emotional desires, bridges ever-changing interpersonal relationships, and drives both the unfolding of the narrative and the construction of textual meaning.

For the need of spreading Buddhist doctrines, the female images in Buddhist avadana literature are pretty rich, ranging from heavenly women to civilian women, but the description of their body images has always maintained an ambiguous and contradictory attitude. First of all, the beauty of women 's body in the avadana literature is extraordinary vague. It not only lacks detailed verbal description, but also weakens the subjectivity of the body. It uses decorative utensils such as gold light, banner cover and incense flower to highlight the ' correct and perfect ' of the women body, which greatly blurs the characteristics of women. Secondly, unlike the beauty of female body, the ugly depiction of it in avadana literature is figurative and detailed. The most common way is to structure the female body and alienate it by means of aging and decay, showing a female body image with rough skin follicles, old bones, dirty smell and urine. Whether it is ' vague beauty ' or ' concrete ugliness ', it consistently reflects Buddhism 's rejection and derogation of women 's bodies. On the one hand, for those who are not pure, the beauty of women is a symbol of sin and lust, and figurative literature discourages the yearning of the masses by demonizing their inner bodies. On the other hand, for those who gain a beautiful appearance by supporting the Buddha, the avadana literature tries to blur its female characteristics, so that the positive ' beauty of women ' presents the characteristics of neutralization and even masculinity. This tendency is particularly evident in the karma of the law. For example, the taboo of talking about the beauty and ugliness of women body in ' mahasamghika ' is detailed to eight parts: lips, armpits, breasts, ribs, navels, abdomens, privates and calves. In addition, the norms of Bhiksuni 's body and dress also adopted the ' de-gendering ' standard. Buddhist practice takes men as the core, and thus takes the female body as the root of desire, so it is obsessed with breaking the beauty of women and exposing their ugliness. In this way, the principle of ' everything visible is empty‌‌ ' is transmitted to the public. Although it does not completely deny the beauty of the female body, it often chooses to degenderize it in occasions where it has to be positively described, and finally leads to the result of changing from female body to male body. That's why, as a model of saints, the most perfect body image in Buddhist literature is always male.

In the scientific and technological imagination such as human-computer interaction, gene conversion and prosthetic implants, women’s body is both confined to the self-confirmation and self-projection of white male authority, and becomes the “symbolic object” characterized with motherhood, reproductive function and objectification in the male power struggle. In the 1960s, in the three space opera novels published in succession, African-American science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany employs the myth of Babel Tower, the Grail legend and the Orpheus myth to present the plight and suffering of women’s body under the “pseudo divine body worship”. However, the female characters in these novels, under the help of science and technology, also reinvent their bodies, especially realize the transformation from the single-gender body to hermaphroditic and even fluid gender bodies. By using science and technology to break through the mythological authority, it symbolizes the writing attempt to break free from the prison of the social discipline of the old soul. Delany, who is both an ethnic other and sexual minority, discovers and concerns the plight of women, and thus conduct the “Utopian” reconstruction for women’s body, which is part of the complex and far-reaching cultural and social context of the 1960s. It also provides a pioneering reference for many female science fiction writers in later generations to explore body expression, so as to discover their subjectivity, relieve the plight of marginalized groups with intersecting identity experience, achieve self-rescue and find more expression possibilities for women and other marginal groups.

Henrik Ibsen’s drama A Doll’s House (1879) is also called Nora after the pro-tagonist. It is one of the most translated and performed dramas across the world, and Ibsen’s manuscript is included in UNESCO’s world heritage list. Hence, to say that Nora is not visible on stage would be a gross understate-ment. More importantly, though, is the fact the drama itself is about her invis-ibility and her fight to be visible as an embodied human being in a family life which itself is nothing but a series of theatrical playing between the characters until she finally breaks the glass ceiling herself as a woman by slamming the door on her husband, heading into an unknown future. However, this shift from invisibility to visibility is not an individual act; it is embedded in a cul-tural context. When translated, adapted and performed in other cultures than its European origin, Nora’s making herself visible has to find other means to make her life understood as a radical act of female visibility. The paper will discuss Ibsen’s play and its transformation into Chinese after 1911 and in the May Fourth movement through the translation of Hu Shih as Nuola (1917) and his dialogical response in English, the short The Greatest Event in Life (1919), later followed by the experimental interactive performance The Great-est Event in a Doll’s Life (2019).

This paper explores the literary and visual representations of women’s bodies in classical Chinese culture, focusing on Qixi poetry and Qiu Ying’s Court Lady Paintings. By examining the idealized female body as both a cultural construct and a symbolic medium, the study investigates how these artistic forms reflect and shape the social, moral, and aesthetic values of their time. In Qixi poetry, women’s bodies are often metaphorically associated with dexterity and virtue, symbolizing their roles in domestic and cosmic harmony. Similarly, Qiu Ying’s Court Lady Paintings depict idealized female figures through exaggerated elegance and refined postures, aligning with imperial and elite expectations. Using an interdisciplinary approach that integrates literary analysis and cultural anthropology, the paper argues that these representations of women’s bodies are not merely aesthetic but serve as tools for constructing and perpetuating gendered social norms. By comparing the portrayals of women’s bodies in poetry and painting, this study reveals the intricate intersections of gender, embodiment, and cultural identity in traditional Chinese art and literature. The research contributes to broader discussions on body politics, exploring how visual and literary narratives mediate understandings of femininity within historical and cultural contexts.

This paper focuses on the descriptions of female incomplete body image in American novels from 2009 to 2016. Based on the social contexts depicted in the works, these novels are categorized into two major categories: "modern consumer society" and "science fictional society".Within the "modern consumer society" , further sub-categories are made according to the different social groups of the main characters, classifying the works into "minority social context" and "mainstream social context". And the theories concluding Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and the feminist body philosophical theories such as those proposed by Elizabeth Grosz and Iris Marion Young have been referred as well. The descriptions also reflects the complex relationships between gender, identity, and power structures in American contemporary society. In the paper, firstly, the novels belonging to "minority social context" use the descriptions of female incomplete body image as a metaphor to uncover historical trauma, racial violence, and the struggle of cultural identification. Here, the incomplete body images are carrying their specific collective memories and tracing their ethnic cultural elements besides gender situation. Novels from the "mainstream social context" tend to pay more attention on themes of family issues and signs of illness to emphasize the deep impact of diseases, as well as the view of life and death, and pressures on the individual. In these, the incomplete body images often represent spiritual crises, and a form of rebellion against the pursuit of the "perfect" body, searching for the true form of existence and dignity in deeper layers. Secondly, the paper shifts to discuss the description of the images in the "science fictional society". In these works, the female incomplete body images is set as a performance having connections with future technologies. And these novels often depict the transformation, control, and shaping of female bodies within fictional background such as human freezing and so on. The paper analyzes the incompleteness of female bodies in these texts and consider it as a means of criticizing social and technological control over women’s bodies and individual identities, reflecting a stronger discussion on the commodification and reconfiguration of female subjectivity in a postmodern era. This study delves in to the meaning embedded the descriptions of female incomplete body image through multiple angels and reveals how such descriptions reflect the loss and reconstruction of individual subjectivity as cultural symbols. In doing so, it highlights how these descriptions reflect deep-rooted human anxieties and cultural crises in the context of postmodern society. By providing a comprehensive analysis of the female body image in contemporary American literature, this research offers a new perspective on the literary representation of the body image and the passive gender situation behind all these descriptions and expressions.

The motif of "difficult marriage proposal" is a recurrent theme in the mythologies and legends of the Korean ethnic group and the Manchu-Tungusic peoples. In the process of courtship, the hero consistently encounters a series of challenges designed to test his prowess, intelligence, and magical abilities. These trials often involve physical contests with the relatives or guardians of the prospective partner, such as combat or slaying formidable creatures like bears, dragons, large fish, or eagles. Intellectual challenges may include selecting the correct fiancée from among many beautiful women or performing tasks that require extraordinary ingenuity. Magical trials might involve dueling with the elders of the suitor's family or using spells to resolve complex problems. The myths and legends of the Korean and Manchurian Tungusic peoples are rich in motifs that test the hero's magic, intelligence, and strength in the context of "difficult courtship." These motifs exhibit the following characteristics:

1. In the Hezhe, Xibe, Ewenki, Oroqen, and other ethnic groups, suitors are often depicted as mediocre yet kind-hearted young men. They frequently rely on divine intervention, rescued animals, or their future wives to overcome challenges and punish evildoers, thereby securing their marriages. In contrast, Korean and Manchu motifs involving magical and intellectual tests are associated with divine figures, endowing the suitors with superhuman magical abilities and wisdom. Consequently, these suitors can complete all difficult tasks without external assistance, facilitating their marriage proposals.

2. Many of the women pursued by the suitors have divine connections.

3. In the courtship motifs that test the hero's magic, strength, and intelligence, the challenges are typically set by the parents or guardians of the prospective bride.

4. In the motifs of heroic magic, there are numerous scenes depicting "incarnations of fighting law" between the suitor and the challenger.

5. In most cases, the individuals who assist the suitors in overcoming challenges are the suitors themselves.

In the folk narrative literature of the Korean and Manchurian Tungusic peoples, the theme of "heroic trials in courtship" carries profound connotations and encompasses several key aspects. First, the motif of "difficult marriage proposal" vividly illustrates the natural principle that "only individuals with superior genetic traits are deemed fit to reproduce." Second, the "difficult proposal" serves as a "rite of passage" to determine whether the suitor is eligible for marriage.Thirdly, the process of the "difficult proposal" serves as a demonstration of the suitor's ability to provide for and protect his family. Fourth, the "difficult marriage proposal" motif reflects the transitional marriage forms of servitude and "redundant husband." Fifth, in the "difficult proposal" motif, women as suitors exhibit unprecedented enthusiasm, subtly revealing the waning influence of the matrilineal era.

There are so many translations (interpretations) of the Book of Changes (Yijing 易经) since the westerners began to know it in the late 15th century, but few were translated (or interpretated) from the gender perspective. Margaret J. Pearson strived for the original meaning of the Book of Changes in many ways. First of all, she pointed out that Wang Bi wrote his commentary based on the assumption that the paired concepts of yin and yang were gendered and existed at the time the Book of Changes was created, and that these concepts are expressed throughout the whole book. But the gendered yin/yang interpretation by Wang Bi in the third century CE is an anachronistic addition to the text, even though it is the earliest extant complete commentary. Secondly, she took Hexagram Hou 姤, the 44th hexagram of the Book of Changes, as an example, to illustrate the rigidly dichotomous and gendered yin/yang analysis of the Book of Changes is anachronistic to the era of its creation and earliest use, which she believed that this is a major justification for seeking a meaning closer to the original. Thirdly, Margaret J. Pearson pointed out that while the unfortunate, dichotomized yin/yang definitions now current in both the West and the East may never fade away, he richer natural imagery that has been obscured by them can invigorate out thinking, help us see beyond conventional divisions, and lead us toward a deeper wisdom, a philosophy perhaps more useful in riding the changes in our own lives and times as well as in interpreting the past. This paper intends to argue whether body of images of women could be perceived in the Book of Changes by investigating Margaret J. Pearson’s gendered interpretation of the Book of Changes.

In Eudora Welty’s (1909-2001) short story collection The Golden Apples, seven interconnected stories span from the early 20th century to the mid-20th century, in which the body images subtly emerge, such as disease, childbirth, sex, and death, depicting the relationship between the female body and consciousness, as well as between the self and the world. These body images outline the journey of women in pursuit of subjectivity during the collapse of Southern Belle culture.

In “Shower of Gold,” Welty portrays the defender of Southern Belle culture by using Snowdie MacLain’s body image. Her pregnancy image exemplifies the bodily disciplining of women under the patriarchal system. In addition to Snowdie, through Katie’s words and bodily rituals, Welty creates a symbolic figure who attempts to maintain the traditional role of women in Southern culture. Also, in previous studies, Cassie Morrison and Jinny Love are often considered adherents of the Southern Belle culture. However, after analyzing their body images, it is clear that they are outwardly following its principles, but inwardly questioning, even shaking the Belle culture. Further, Easter and Mattie Will deconstruct the Southern Belle culture. In “Moon Lake,” Easter’s hair, eyes, and sleeping posture break through the traditional gender boundaries and restrictions, embodying the image of androgyny. This image deconstructs the Southern Belle culture’s monolithic expectations for women’s appearance and behavior, emphasizing the body’s expressive power in gender fluidity. Mattie, in her sexual relationship with King, shifts from a passive, worshipped, and gazed-at object to an active, dominating, and gazing-at subject. The bodily images and behavioral expressions of Easter and Mattie challenge the constraints of Southern Belle culture, demonstrate the complexity and initiative of women in the intersection of gender, power, and desire.

Like Easter, Virgil is androgynous. The image of Virgie as both feminine charm and masculine roughness, her unkempt and free-spirited body language directly expresses her rejection of the Southern social expectations of women’s decorum and grace, marking her defiance against traditional gender norms. Moreover, the scene of baptism-like sexual intercourse in the Big Black River further reflects her radical transcendence and refusal to be bound by the gender norms of Southern society. Ultimately, she chooses to define her own life as a true wanderer as her piano teacher, Miss Eckhart, who truly realizes the identity of the wanderer.

In The Golden Apples, body is intended as a controlling devise to deconstruct the traditional patriarchal society, the male-female power dynamics and redefine women’s roles within the Southern social order. This reclamation not only critiques the myth of the idealized Southern Belle culture, but also underscores the evolving identities of women, heralding a transformative shift toward modernity and women’s construction of subjectivity.

Abstract:

Labeled as an "erotic writer," Philip Roth grapples with the tension between his Jewish identity and the countercultural liberation movements in America. Within the intersecting domains of sexual liberation and self-identity, Roth frequently constructs his perceptions of eroticism and gender relations through the imagery of the female body.

This article analyzes narrative fragments from his novels, focusing on animal metaphors in erotic depictions, male-gaze-driven body imagery, and portrayals of bodily illness. Through these animalized representations, the article demonstrates how Roth employs an absurd, postmodern experimental approach to demystify the female body and subvert societal norms.

First, the animal metaphors in erotic depictions appeal for the natural animalistic desires and behaviors inherent in humans. Second, the male-gaze-driven animalization of female body components, combined with tedious and repetitive imagery of body parts, critiques the era's stereotypical and objectifying fantasies about the female body. Finally, the body disease with animal metaphors frequently corresponds to the tragic destinies of female characters, implying the enduring constraints imposed on female sexual liberation and bodily autonomy.

This article concludes that Roth’s seemingly absurd, game-like portrayal of the female body serves to reclaim female independence and subjectivity, advancing a nuanced critique of societal and cultural disciplining of the body.

Richard Yates, in his representative works "Revolutionary Road" and "Easter Parade", depicts the heroines of the two works, April and Emily, with exquisite psychological and physical imagery, whose lives end in the pursuit of their dreams, and who perform a modern and melancholic interpretation of "heroic" performances. In particular, the metaphorical physical performative personality is impressive, providing us with a theoretical paradigm for exploring the true dimension of life." Performance" is a concept that transcends time and space. Performance" is a psychological proposition that transcends time, space and culture, and opens up cultural dimensions such as literature, gender studies and historiography, etc. By examining the value system and deeper meaning carried by these different individuals at the level of bodily performances, and by analysing the speech strategies of the disadvantaged performers under the strong discourse, this paper provides a space to think about the disadvantaged performative individuals in their struggle for the "reasonableness of existence".

This paper employs Luce Irigaray's theories on the female body to analyze Angela Carter's novels, The Passion of New Eve and Heroes and Villians, focusing on how Carter reimagines and redefines female body imagery in her works. Irigaray's critique of phallocentric discourse and her emphasis on the specificity of female embodiment provide a theoretical framework for understanding Carter's subversive portrayal of female characters. Similarly, Carter's female characters often defy traditional gender roles, embracing their bodies as sources of power and creativity. This paper argues that Carter's literary project aligns with Irigaray's call for a feminine imaginary that celebrates difference and multiplicity. Through her innovative narratives, Carter not only deconstructs oppressive representations of the female body but also envisions new possibilities for female subjectivity and expression. The study concludes that Carter's work contributes significantly to feminist literary discourse by offering a radical rethinking of the female body and its potential for liberation.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), a representative of American confessional poets who is regarded as the youngest and most talented female poet, became the most influential poetess since Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop.

Plath's revisionist strategy is accomplished through her portrayal of the female body in her literary creations. In her literary creations, Plath expresses her own life, her own existence in its original form. Unlike her literary predecessors, most of whose mothers hid the self-image of the agonized madwoman in the attic of their novels, Plath becomes the madwoman herself, both in the ironic sense of a female author playing the role of the madwoman in a male-centered society, and in the sense of a female author playing the role of the madwoman in a male-centered society. She becomes a madwoman herself, both in the sense of a female author playing the role of a madwoman in the ironic sense of a male-centered society, and in the true sense of a real-life hysteric. She expresses herself as an imaginary person, and her poetry is so dramatic that it can be understood as an elaborate set of dramatic monologues. The female bodies in Plath's work, all of which are her props, are full of dramatic performance. For example, the ceramic head of a woman is brought to life in the poem with a brick gray face and eyes under fat eyelids, as if she were an ape full of malice but with her face. In appearance, the head is ugly, angry, and cool like the poet. The poem can be a fight to the death around the ceramic head of the lady, as well as the squid-like body in Plath's work, the more angry the more she has to undergo electroshock therapy, just like the crazy, death-loving her. Plath's style of work is confessional and gothic, and she often finds the equivalent of her own life in her own work, using a lot of metaphors. metaphors, and she uses a great deal of female body imagery to express her desires, showing a female writer madly subverting and indicting the male world.

Few contemporary films delve as deeply and in such an original and impactful way into the issue of female body image as The Substance by Coralie Fargeat. The film revisits a long history of representing the female body, projecting sexism, ageism, abjection, disgust, beauty, and ugliness onto it. In Western art history, starting from the Renaissance, this classical theme of the confrontation between the beautiful body of the young woman and the abject body of the elderly woman is well-documented. Hans Baldung Grien (The Ages of Woman and Death, The Three Phases of Life and Death), Caravaggio (Judith and Holofernes), Albrecht Dürer, and later Goya also portrayed elderly women or witches with grotesque characteristics. A painting that epitomizes this theme is Lucas Cranach’s The Fountain of Youth (1546), which juxtaposes depictions of elderly women with flirtatious, youthful beauties, summarizing the plot of The Substance.

However, the film’s director introduces a rejuvenation device that merges both bodies into the same individual, who, now split, wages war against herself, transforming the elderly body into pure flesh and abjection. The final scene suggests a form of feminine revenge against the objectification of women’s bodies. Other films in the body horror genre have influenced the construction of Demi Moore’s monstrous transformation in The Substance, such as the infamous “bathtub woman” in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).

In this presentation, I intend not only to provide a brief historical overview of the abject representation of the elderly female body but also to reflect, through Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, on the meaning of this (anti-)machist theater of horror that Fargeat presents. It is worth noting that the film also portrays the media mogul, played by Dennis Quaid, as an abject, grotesque figure. This character combines extreme sexism with a filthy male body, with a mouth transformed into an anus—eloquently illustrating how he speaks nothing but “crap.”

The 2024 drama Like a Rolling Stone (出走的决心) presents the story of a 50-year-old woman who has spent her life living for others. After enduring years of familial pressure, she ultimately decides to leave, marking a pivotal moment of self-liberation. Told from a female perspective, the film offers a contemporary reexamination of the “Nora’s departure” theme, positioning itself as a reimagining of the Nora myth in the new era. Unlike the 1920s, when Nora’s story first entered China and departure was often idealized, this film explores the practicalities of leaving, questioning not only the act of departure itself but also the complexities of life thereafter. The shift from idealism to realism reflects a more thoughtful, strategic approach to personal liberation. The film addresses not only the empowerment of women but also delves into the underlying societal structures that perpetuate their oppression.

The film’s deeper reflection on Nora’s departure is evident in three key aspects: First, the protagonist’s departure from both her father’s and her husband’s homes highlights the evolution of the Nora myth since the New Culture Movement. Nora’s original departure in A Doll’s House symbolizes a quest for personal independence, but as the myth entered China, it became a symbol of resistance to arranged marriages and evolved to reflect the pursuit of romantic freedom. In the 1930s, during the push for women’s liberation, the focus shifted to the call for women to leave their husbands’ homes.

Second, the protagonist’s careful preparations, particularly her focus on achieving financial independence, underscores the importance of economic autonomy in the process of liberation. This mirrors the growing recognition of economic rights within women’s liberation discourse. Initially, the emphasis was on the spontaneous act of departure, but with the introduction of Marxist theories, economic independence became central, prompting deeper reflections on the aftermath of Nora’s departure.

Finally, the film does not focus on a male-female binary but instead reveals the structural societal issues that contribute to women’s oppression. The protagonist’s daughter, driven by her own career concerns, pressures her mother to stay, suggesting that the forces oppressing women are not solely patriarchal but also tied to a capitalist, patriarchal system. This sophisticated treatment of women’s issues demonstrates a mature understanding of the complexities of liberation.

Like a Rolling Stone offers a contemporary reflection on the Nora myth, encapsulating the evolution of women’s struggles in China and providing new insights into the challenges of women’s liberation in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Jonathan Swift, an 18th-century English poet and satirical novelist, is dismissed as a misogynist for his anti-aesthetic treatment of female body images in Gulliver’s Travels and a series of scatological poems. Swift employed a strategy of depicting ugliness in female body images to challenge the conventional perceptions of women and the objective world held by male voyeurs or narrators. In Gulliver’s Travels, the passionate and lustful image of the female Yahoo with her disgusting filthy bodies subverts the traditional male courtship model and stereotypes of female physical attractiveness. Besides, his scatological poems, such as “The Lady’s Dressing Room”, “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed”, “Strephon and Chloe” and so on, delicately depict women’s excremental vision in private space and the real state of their bodies from the perspective of male gaze, which not only surpasses the aesthetic confines of libertine tendencies prevalent in early 18th-century England but also reveals the concurrent existence of beauty and ugliness in the objective world.

From Swift’s poems and personal letters, it can be seen that the purpose of uglitic appreciation of womanhood is not to disparage women, but rather to dismantle the pretension and ostentation built upon luxury consumption and the female image within the male aesthetic perspective. Swift's works are frequently misconstrued as expressing misogyny, yet in reality, his thoughts lean more towards a form of impartial misanthropy. Swift gets rid of Descartes’ mind-body dualism, emphasizing the integration of body and spirit in his works. He believes that physical ugliness is not limited to one gender. Swift’s poem “Cadenus and Vanessa”, published in the same year as Gulliver’s Travels, and his epistolary diary even hints that women have equal potential to men on a spiritual level. However, despite reshaping the female image and altering the paradigm of gender relations, Swift does not intend to subvert the social order; rather, he aspires to enhance the moral and spiritual realms of both sexes, particularly women. During that period, British society was contemplating the excesses of libertinism and luxury consumption, and embarked on a reform aimed at improving moral standards and public behavior, thereby enhancing social morality. Swift responds to the call for social reform through his appreciation of ugliness in his works, uncovering the ugliness of real life, and thus urging readers to awaken amidst the ugly yet authentic realities, ultimately fostering social progress and the refinement of humanity. Therefore, from the reflection of female body images to the hope for an elevation in the moral standards of both genders, misogyny and scatology ultimately reveals Swift’s sentiment of social reform.

The literary creations of domestic workers constitute a significant component of Chinese new worker literature. In these non-fiction works, the physical images of domestic workers evolve from victims of domestic violence and instrumentalized tools in labor to beings who attain subjective cognition through literary expression. This transformation process unfolds in three primary stages: in rural areas, their bodies are subjected to discipline and oppression, including shaming education during growth and domestic violence within marriage; in domestic labor, their bodies are neglected and objectified as tools of labor; and through literary creation, they re-examine their bodies and emotions, discovering their own value through sisterhood identification. The physical writing of domestic workers demonstrates the dual emancipation process of the bodies and emotions of new worker women: on the one hand, these women revisit their bodies through literature, resisting their fate of being oppressed and objectified; on the other hand, their emotional awakening is accompanied by reflection on gender oppression and class inequality within the urban-rural dual structure. This awakening of subjectivity, from body to emotion and from individual to collective, not only showcases the crucial role of literature as an empowering tool but also serves as a literary testament to the historical situation of new worker women in this era.

Against the backdrop of the Cold War,McCarthyism and the Cold War containment policy instigated a heightened sense of public sensitivity and panic regarding the underlying violations and deviant behaviors.As the cultural context trended towards popularization,it was inevitably and closely intertwined with regulatory discourses,which were disseminated through medical fields such as psychiatry.Richard Yates,an American writer,by focusing on the issue of mental illness in the cultural context from the 1950s to the 1960s,revealed the degradation of the middle class's subject power in the post-war American cultural narrative.In Yates's works,the mentally ill are depicted as malleable symbols,representing the public's anxiety and challenging and polysemous concepts.These characters,often referred to as "Foucaultian madmen,"diverge from the previous stagnant "simulacra" and are instead positioned as the other within Deleuze's "becoming" context.Through absolute freedom and acts of destruction,they subvert the implicit social regulations that govern them.While confronting the suspension of "bare life,"they compel readers to reevaluate the general medical premises represented by psychiatry.

On this basis,Yates' novel in different periods corresponded to the phased characteristics of the development of mental illness treatment in the United States,providing a clear perspective on the ever-changing mental health diagnosis methods in post-war America.In his early novels,Yates revealed the transformation process of the psychoanalytic discipline from experiencing a short-lived peak in the late 1950s to gradually declining in the early 1960s by depicting the disadvantaged position of women in the psychoanalysis and treatment system.This perspective is rooted in the practical needs of post-war medical care and cost-saving in medical expenses,as well as the continuous attention of the media and the film industry to "mental illness".He thus criticized the legitimacy and effectiveness of this discipline from the perspective of the private sphere.The exposure of the poor conditions in state-run mental hospitals by Life and CBS in the 1960s,and Kennedy's vigorous promotion of institutional reform for mental illness,prompted Yates to shift his focus to the public sphere in his later works.By capturing the psychological states and distinctive experiences of the protagonists,he made a thorough evaluation of institutionalized treatment services within the national public sphere from two aspects:the spatial power mechanism and the delayed-onset harm of custodial treatment.Yates' works rendered mental illness and its treatment as crucial components of body metaphor,revealing how individuals break free from coercion and bondage in the context of “impotentiality”.Consequently,a brand-new dialogue space was formed.While deconstructing the futile pursuit of regulation,the text also explores the human cost associated with the harmonious operation of a democratic society.

During the 1950s, the writers portrayed a series of images of nursing mothers, leaving a traceable legacy of visions of Chinese women. These images are not only a literary description of the movements, “The Campaign of Defending World Peace” “The Movement of Literacy” and “The Movement of Collective Parenting”, which documented the development of bio-politics in New China, but also a demonstration of the realization of bio-governance at the grassroots level and of the liberation and development of women during the 1950s. This article aims to investigate the images of these women and their bodies, which significantly affect the reformation of Chinese fertility culture, the improvement of daily life, the change of power dynamics between genders, and the development of bio-politics during the 1950s.

Xue Mo is a prominent contemporary novelist known for his authentic portrayal of rural village life in northwestern China. The fictional world that Xue Mo has created is imbued with a romantic longing for a lost nomadic lifestyle, a lyrical iteration of primitivity and rawness, rich surrealistic imagery, and folkloric figures that have long enthralled the Chinese readers, but this is also a world of misery, pain, violence, and depravity built upon the theme of the body in distress and the soul for salvation. This theme echoes through a number of Xue Mo’s award-winning fictions, including the recently translated novel Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia. With his characteristic style of “enchanted narrative” that breaks the barriers of time and space to tell an eternal story of suffering, romance, and redemption that lasts from the Kingdom of Xixia (1032-1227) to the present time, Xue Mo reconfigures the distressed body as a re-evocation of the Buddhist paradox about the body and the soul in an enriched modern context of empathy and enlightenment.

In their paper "On the Impaired Female Body Image in the U.S. Novels (1990-2020)" Peina Zhuang and Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek analyze the representations and features of the impaired body images of women. They note that different periods (as divided into 1990-2000, 2001-2008 and 2009-2020) have their own focus on the images and also the causes they want to present. For instance, novels in the period from 2001-2008 devote large space to the depiction of an impaired body image related with natural disasters and modern medicine, as demonstrated by the bomb in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the reduced linguistic ability caused by a stroke in Everyman, the postoperative head scar in Exit Ghost, and the self-harm inflicted by Marilyn due to mental breakdown in Blonde. And the causes for the impairment in 2009-2020 change into factors, such as aging, rape, car accident, shooting and so on. So, the depiction of such images is not merely a simple writing of the physiological “scar.” This paper argues that the shift from portraying power dynamics in gender relations and social status to reflecting the impact of uncontrollable forces—such as war, disasters, and illness—on the human body highlights postmodern fiction’s meditation on the unpredictability of fate. It extends the focus on the dignity of marginalized and vulnerable groups to encompass the dignity of ordinary individuals.

In the poetry collection Put Dinner in the Drawer, Han Jiang attaches great importance to the "body" of human beings. While she depicts daily life in a true way, she also highlights individual consciousness in a way of "body writing", that is, she expresses the inner spiritual world with the extreme perception of the body, so as to realize the communication and commonality between the individual spirit and the real world. The perception of the body in Han Jiang's poetry is presented through three specific aspects: first, the embodied "anatomy of the body" presents the broken body, expressing the poet's attempt to achieve a complete personality; Secondly, the two kinds of media of bodily perception, "visual" and "anti-visual", give the body in her poems meaning that transcends individuality. Finally, the body perception in Han Jiang's poetry has a unique value in the aspects of humanistic concern and concern for South Korean traditional culture.

Tötösy de Zepetnek, Steven.

"Towards a Theoretical Framework for Analyses of Body Images of Women in Literature"

Abstract: In his presentation "Towards a Theoretical Framework for Analyses of Body Images of Women in Literature" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses a number of seminal texts which provide a theoretical framework for the study and analyses of body image(s) of women in literature. For example, Paul Schilder defined body image as "the picture of our own body which we form in our mind, that is to say, the way in which the body appears to ourselves." Image(s) indicate(s) that we are not dealing with a mere sensation or imagination: there are mental pictures and representations involved, but it is not mere representation. Sarah Grogan defined body image as "a person's perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about his or her body. This definition can be taken to include psychological concepts such as perception and attitudes toward the body, as well as experiences of embodiment. The concept of body image is used in several disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, philosophy, cultural studies, feminist studies and the media also often use the term and concept. Definitions of body image extends to the conscious and unconscious, the external and internal, reality and fantasy, as well as cultural and social forces and factors which affect body image such as gender, social media, ethnicity, social class, etc. Perspectives of "body image(s)" include "beauty," "ugliness," relationships between men and women, age and ageing of women, the image of the body and eroticism of women, etc.

Keywords: Body Images; Women’s Literature; Literary and Culture Theory

The concept of “Revolution plus Love” (geming jia lianai) emerged in the late 1920s as a literary response to political upheaval, intertwining political commitment with personal desire. This formula became a site where power, gender, politics, and literature intersected, offering a feminist lens on modern Chinese revolutionary literature.

With the rise of feminist theory, scholars have scrutinized the gendered dimensions of China’s revolutionary history, exposing discursive fissures in the nation/state myth. David Der-wei Wang and Jianmei Liu employed the “Revolution plus Love” formula as a case study to examine the gender and literary politics of modern China.Through the metaphor of syphilis, they highlighted the disparities between leftist male writers and their female contemporaries.

Against the backdrop of wars, women are often incorporated into the discourse of nation, ethnicity, and revolution, becoming symbols and representations within revolutionary narratives. Their bodies often serve as both weapons and instruments of revolution. This paper compares four literary texts set in similar historical contexts—Bai Wei’s A Bomb and an Expeditionary Bird (Zhadan yu feiniao), Jiang Guangci’s The Moon Forces Its Way through the Clouds (Chongchu yunwei de yueliang), Ding Ling’s When I Was in Xia Village (Wo zai xiacun de shihou), and Eileen Chang’s Lust, Caution (Se, jie). By analyzing these works, this study explores how different writers reconfigure the RPL formula, revealing the multifaceted interplay of revolution, love, and the female body while examining female identity construction in wartime.

This study highlights the divergent rhetorical strategies of male and female writers. Male narratives tended to reduce the female body to an expendable instrument for national or revolutionary agendas, whereas female writers foregrounded suffering, desire, and resistance. By employing mimicry, parody, and displacement, female writers critiqued the patriarchal foundations of revolutionary discourse and tried to reclaim the female body as a site of both political and personal agency.

Ultimately, this study examines how reconfigurations of the RPL formula challenge traditional male narratives. By employing rhetorical strategies centered on the body and desire, modern female writers deconstructed and redefined chastity within a patriarchal framework, creating new spaces for female subjectivity and expression.

This paper explores the construction of female identity through the fetishism of the head and the theme of death in two late 19th-century plays, Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen and Salomé by Oscar Wilde. By comparing the two works, the paper examines how the female protagonists engage in extreme behaviors related to their bodies in an attempt to assert meaning, subjectivity, and self-affirmation. In Salomé, the protagonist's obsession with Jokanaan's severed head and her desire to kiss this object of death demonstrate her fixation on mortality. In Hedda Gabler, Hedda's targeting of the heads of her former lover and current rival with a gun and flame symbolizes her struggle for control and self-destruction. These women construct their identities through actions closely tied to Memento Mori—the reminder of death—demonstrating an extreme aesthetic of self-destruction as a means of confirming their existence. In this way, death ceases to be merely an end; it becomes a symbol of existence and meaning. The intersection of head fetishism and the death motif reflects the complex emotional landscape of the fin-de-siècle, revealing how women, situated between the constraints of traditional and modern worlds, resist or respond to external pressures through self-destructive acts.

Rethinking the subject of the “moral disciplining” in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded outside the traditional interpretations, this paper aims to uncover how the reversed disciplining game, which is manipulated and practiced by the male protagonist -Mr. B to the female protagonist – Pamela, the maid, is played through the strategy of “sensualizing morality”. It is right in the overwhelming narrating and presenting of Pamela and the nearly absence of expressing and commenting of Mr.B in this epistolary novel that we find a hidden leading of the morally dominated Mr.B . Beneath the text of Pamela’s disciplining of him in spiritual morality, there is a subtext of Mr.B’s disciplining of Pamela by sensualizing morality, which fabricates Pamela’s identity of being enlightened in unconscious through expanding and diversifying her “virtue” in four respects below: endowing the concept of chastity with “body” and “sensibility”; highlighting the double advantages of “sensualized morality” practically and esthetically over the religious morality; shaping the individual “enlightenment self” through secularization of Puritanical moral principles; providing multiple possibilities of constructing new form of “ virtue” with the game of sensual writing. As the result of this sensualizing disciplining, Mr.B successfully cultivates a “double life” in Pamela of “social moral identity” in sense and “private moral identity” in sensuality, which ensures the ever-lasting vitality and fascination of love and sex in their marriage. The new form of moral identity relies more on Richardson’s unique literary creativity than just the mirroring of realistic world, which distinguishes this novel by shedding a new light on the rich ambiguity and unpredictability of enlightenment discourses in the 18th century.

During the industrial age, Britain developed rapidly, and as machine production progressed, people gradually became alienated. When Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he observed the distortion of humanity caused by mechanization and technology, as well as the oppression and resistance stemming from class differences. Although the sexual encounters he depicted were explicit, they also showcased women’s control over their own bodies. In the 1980s, Hong Kong experienced a golden period of rapid economic growth and was hailed as one of the “Four Asian Tigers”. Men in Hong Kong held absolute power and status in the commodity market, while women were in an awkward position in such a social environment. Their youth, beauty, and alluring bodies became their bargaining chips. Author Yi Shu created the representative character Jiang Xibao based on this reality, showcasing the life struggles of some young and beautiful women of that time and reflecting on her thoughts. Connie is an upper-class woman seeking a lover in the works of a male author, while Xibao is a mistress chosen by the upper class in the writings of a female author. Under the dual emptiness of spirit and body, Connie engages in multiple encounters with the servant Mellors in a forest that symbolizes freedom. Throughout this process, Connie becomes increasingly dissatisfied with her husband’s control over her body, and while pursuing physical pleasure with Mellors, she gradually regains her sense of bodily autonomy and self. In Xi Bao, Jiang Xibao initially possesses control over her own body, but her desire for money leads her to exchange her body and youthful beauty for financial gain. In acquiring money, she loses her power of choice and becomes lost in herself. Both works have been adapted into films in modern times, where directors and actresses engage in the deconstruction and reconstruction of the original narratives. This paper will compare and analyze the physical descriptions of Connie and Xibao in the texts, reflecting women’s control and choices regarding their own bodies, as well as the similarities and differences in how male and female authors portray women in similar social contexts. This analysis holds significance for comparative literature and cross-cultural communication. Additionally, the paper will provide a focused interpretation of the cinematic adaptations of both works, aiming to explore the modern value of these two pieces more profoundly.

We are soaked and steeped, permeated and marinated, saturated and percolated with water. We know, need, and love water because it constitutes our very existence. Aware that we are always in danger of drying out and are thus constantly in need of moistening, we enjoy when water touches us—even as we are conscious that it can drown us. Water is an active thing with stories and histories to tell, yet it has no desire to tell them. What it offers it offers without goodness or depravity, generosity or stinginess, vision or blindness, love or hate. Indeed, our love affair with water is totally one-sided: we need it; it doesn’t need us. The touches we enjoy from it are not the touches of a lover—even as we experience these touches as intimate, sensuous, and stimulating. And the body is intimately wet; yet theorizing about the body has been sorely dry and has lacked contact with the Blue Humanities. This talk will argue that representations of corporeality hinge on socio-cultural understandings of water and our relationships with it. Expanding the Blue Humanities into theories about corporeality, my talk will focus on literary wet bodies and narratives of women's immersion (primarily in the work of Amitav Ghosh and Bong Joon-ho, with a few nods to Shakespeare) and will show how recognizing socio-political views about water determine how we see bodies.

Around the saying that “when we gather the mustard plant and earth melons, we do not reject them because of their roots” (采葑采菲，无以下体) in the song titled as “Gu Feng” from Book of Songs (Shi Jing), the traditional interpretation represented by The Spring and Autumn Annals (Zuo Zhuan) and Mao Shi annotated by Zheng Xuan in the Han Dynasty, mainly focuses on the ethical principle of “choosing good part” (取善节), which calls for men in marriage to pay more attention to female virtues, rather than the physiological aesthetics directly symbolized by the “roots” (下体). This article takes the annotations on “Cai Fei” (采菲) in Xian Qing Ou Ji (闲情偶寄) and Xiang Lian Pin Zao (香莲品藻) in the Qing Dynasty as the center, surveying in the last traditional period of Bound-foot Fetish, the “gathering earth melons” has changed from the single ethical metaphor to one popular core expression of literati, who liked to play between body obscenity and the Classical orthodoxy. In Cai Fei Lu (采菲录) by Yao Lingxi during the Republic of China era, this expression has then become the final projection of the contradiction between the “loss” of sexual desire expressed by men through nostalgic writing and the “unattainableness” of the times.

Since the first decisive intermediality occurred when orality became inscribed in writing, the arts have always known intermediality as an option. A novel can be turned into movie, a play, an opera, a ballet and a good deal more and thus be part of an intermedial processes. Yet, for the novel to be a novel, it does not need the intermedial transformation. However, in other cases intermediality is necessary for the aesthetic product to exist: a music score has to be performed; a film script has to be shot. The same film can then be shown again and again in an identical form for new audiences. Likewise, a study recording of a performance of a symphony can be reiterated as a CD or a DVD. Yet, the live, embodied performance itself in a study or a concert hall cannot. If performed again it is a new event. The same goes for theatre across the theatrical genres: intermediality is a basic condition for any dramatic genre to exist. And yet, there is a notable difference to a live concert: a classical score cannot be changed, only the performance of it. By contrast, a new performance of a drama may involve translation, abbreviations and use of new technology and still be Hamlet or Le nozze di Figaro for new audiences in new cultural contexts. Hence, intermediality in theatre defines both the basic condition for any staging of a drama and for its re-staging in a new context, often with a change of the textual basis and maybe of the very idea of what a staging is. Different from music, in theatre intermediality generates a reciprocal dynamics between text and staging that defines its cultural dynamics. My paper will exemplify this argument in relation to Mozart/da Ponte's Le nozze di Figaro and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Kris Verdonck is an artist who integrates theater, visual arts, and new media to create innovative reinterpretations of Beckett’s plays within the context of posthuman theory and cross-media art. This paper examines how Verdonck, through the fusion of technological devices, stage space, and performers, presents the crisis of subjectivity, body alienation, and language deconstruction in the posthuman era. By analyzing Actor 1, End, and Conversation Piece, the paper demonstrates how Verdonck uses devices and technology to mediate Beckett’s absurdist philosophy and explores the multiple dimensions of posthuman performance through human-machine interaction and sensory reconfiguration. This study offers significant insights into the intersection of theater and art in the posthuman context.

Contemporary art is currently experiencing a "performative" transformation, with the "presenting sign" serving as a critical dimension for understanding the construction of power within the realm of contemporary theater. Initially, after the modern stage was established, actors were either confined to textual symbols or adhered strictly to the director's vision, resulting in their appearance being consistently suppressed. Gordon Craig's "Super golem" manifesto subtly reveals the director's ambitions. However, the stage practices of Cirque du Soleil exhibit distinct characteristics. In puppet theater, puppets are transformed into objects of aesthetic experience, enabling actors to achieve an integration of "art and performance." Furthermore, the staff members who form the operational foundation of the theater are excluded from direct stage production due to the principle of theatrical illusion. This exclusion reinforces the creation of hallucinatory mechanisms.

In the process of human performers embodying puppets, a cross-media dialogue between human and nonhuman entities is actualized, pursuing the actor's self-evolution. Performers must first identify the "bodily action lines" within scenes—performance schemata composed of minute, precisely defined "somatic movements". The architect's wife's action of picking up a knife to avenge her husband is deconstructed into a sequence of protracted movements: searching, discovering, bending, contacting. Through temporal dilation effects, this choreography intensifies the synesthetic perception of puppet-object interaction. Contrary to inducing dissociation, the decelerated motions demand hyper-attention—an embodied anticipation toward the climactic grasp. Simultaneously, this amplifies the affective virulence of vengeful pathos. During this temporal distension, performers cyclically metabolize the character's psyche, generating an energetic continuum through movement precision. Does this methodology forge a *cybernetic performative apparatus? Is the purported "self-evolution" an emancipation of subjectivity or a Foucauldian intensification of *technologies of the self-through disciplinary somatics?

Science fiction, with its focus on technological innovation, futurism, speculation, and virtual reality, is creating new forms and content that bridge the physical and fictional worlds. By offering experiences and insights into possible futures, it is also constructing a new system of knowledge. This paper argues that science fiction, as a new knowledge system, is chiefly expressed through its virtual simulation model, which is opening doors to new realities. The discussion will unfold in three key areas: 1. Science fiction narratives (including AI literature) as a new model for connecting the real and virtual worlds. 2. Science fiction games as a new medium for bridging entertainment and serious philosophical ideas. 3. The logical construction of human-machine cyborg subjects and the new development of subjectivity. The real world is increasingly becoming a science fiction world. Science fiction will establish new modes of subject cognition in the dimensions of reality and virtuality, the physical and the surreal.

As one of the major narrative modes of English Cli-fi fiction, post-apocalyptic writing began to flourish in the twenty-first century. It is notable that among them, some post-apocalyptic novels not only engage such crucial elements of the Anthropocene imagination as extinction, epidemics, energy depletion and survival, but also use intermedial forms within the language-based novel. Station Eleven, a post-apocalyptic fiction which won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award by Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel, is such an Ekphrasis text that uses language to represent music, drama and graphic story. What is the efficacy of different cultural forms in conveying the moral messages of the post-apocalyptic imagination? If human civilization collapses, what can be preserved to make people survive? This article uses Station Eleven and its TV series adaptation as a case study to ponder on the issue of intermedial performativity, i.e. the transformative power of the intertwined relationships among individuals, artifacts, and hybrid cultural forms to highlight the importance of literature and art in keeping people to live on.

"Black Myth: Wukong," as the first Chinese AAA game, is said to be "saturated with literary expression and narrative experience rooted in literature" . This "literariness oriented game narrative design" not only prompts reflections on the pathways and methods for Chinese culture to go global but also inspires deeper thoughts on the reinterpretation of traditional literature, the fusion of literature and gaming, the discussion of literary themes, and the exploration of new literary narrative forms.Firstly, the narrative design of Black Myth: Wukong draws on the allegorical framework of Xiyouji by blending and deeply integrating various media forms. It adopts the "earthworm-like structure" of the original Journey to the West (as described by Zheng Zhenduo), constructing an allegorical tale that transitions from surface-level narrative to mid-level narrative and ultimately to deep-level narrative.Secondly, Black Myth: Wukong constructs well-rounded character portrayals by blending divinity, animality, and humanity, breaking free from the traditional game's constraint of "purely good or evil" flat character archetypes. Unlike the original work, the narrative designers utilize media transitions to alter the human traits embedded in divine, Buddhist, and demonic characters, challenging players' expectations of the classic roles from the original story. Through the reversal of character archetypes, the game crafts a grand and tragic masterpiece, eliciting emotional release and catharsis from the players.Thirdly, unlike Western narrative traditions, rhetorical techniques such as the "virtual storytelling context, playful use of character names, and the incorporation of poetry and song" depict a classical Chinese society, offering readers a poetic reading experience (Pu Andy, 2018: 124-144). The narrative designers of Black Myth: Wukong draw inspiration from the rhetorical forms employed in Chinese literary masterpieces, striving to deliver a similarly poetic experience to players.

This speech is to address the issue of intermedial performativity through some examples from contemporary performance arts. As a neologism, “intermedial performativity” will be approached from the perspective of theoretical entanglements of intermediality intersected by performativity. The following questions are to be discussed: What happens to the agents that interact with each other in the process of intermedial production? What performative effects does the mixing or interactions of different media bring about to the agents involved? How does the intermedial mingling serve the purpose of cultural and social intervention? One of the case studies will focus on the blending of Chinese calligraphy and Kun opera in an avantgarde Kun opera production Cang-Beng (Hiding-Flee) in 2006. The other will deal with the various adaptations of Italian opera Turandot in different innovative forms in China since 1998, including opera at the original site, music concerts and local Chinese operas, which have not just been staged in China and in many different parts of the world, including in Europe. While the former analyzes the issues of subjectivity and contemporariness in relation to intermedial performativity, the latter interrogates the ambiguities of Chineseness in the global context.

Traditional Chinese opera has been revitalized in recent years, frequently breaking out with spectacular performances and showing strong artistic prowess. New Dragon Gate Inn, an immersive Yue Opera, performed by Xiao baihua Yue Opera troupe and premiered in Hangzhou, China in March, 2023 has been such a hit that it has drawn thousands of fans, including the young audience, from all over China flocking to Hangzhou to watch the show. As the live performance in the theater is only accessible to a limited number of audience and there is a much greater demand for the show, a documentary film of the performance was made and released in August 2024. Why is this show so appealing? As a matter of fact, this opera is adapted from the classic martial arts film of the same title released in 1992 which is a remake of the earlier classic martial arts film Dragon Gate Inn directed released in 1967. The storylines of the three works are seem quite simiple and conventional, revolving around the theme of conflict between the good and evil, which is placed in the context of Confucian morality and social hierarchical structure of the imperial China. Though each of the three works achives great success in its unique way： 1967 film features realism, 1992 remake features romanticism while 2023 Yue Opera features aethetcism, there is constant interaction between film and theater to be explored in my presentation.

This article critiques Contemporary Legend Theatre’s (CLT) recent adaptation of Willim Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and focuses on how its pursuit of contemporary resonance through multimedia and Western operatic elements risks overshadowing the core aesthetics of jingju (Peking opera). While CLT, under Wu Hsing-kuo, has long sought to modernize jingju by engaging with Western theatre and current themes, Julius Caesar becomes “lost in projection”—both literally and metaphorically. The production, which explores timeless themes of democracy, dictatorship, war, and peace in the post-pandemic world, relies heavily on digital projections and real-time video, which overshadows the performative richness of jingju’s symbolic gestures, musicality, and ritualistic elements. This overemphasis on spectacle dilutes the cultural specificity and liveness that define jingju and caused it to fade into the background of a media-driven performance. Drawing on concepts from intermediality and performance theory, the article critiques this imbalance and calls for a rebalancing of modernization efforts—one that preserves jingju’s unique traditions while still engaging with contemporary contexts. In seeking to make jingju relevant for modern audiences, CLT may risk losing the very essence of the art form it aims to rejuvenate.

As a young artist who has grown up in the 21st century, Li Shun employs "light and shadow" as the medium for his artistic creation. In the three sections of his art exhibition titled "Capturing Light and Shadow", he has accomplished the inheritance and innovation of traditional Chinese literati art through intermedia means by utilizing video, paintings, calligraphy works, and urban landmarks. From the perspective of Lars Elleström's theory of media modalities, Li Shun's exhibition is intricately connected across four aspects: material, sensorial, spatiotemporal, and semiotic modalities, forming a media mixture of "light and shadow" art within the intermedia field. Li Shun's intermedia reinterpretation of traditional Chinese literati art inspires young artists not only to modernize traditional art in terms of form and content but also to recognize that art is a metaphysical spirit rather than a physical skill. Intermedia art creation is in the ascendant, and the mission of young artists to "fight for art" continues.

The ‘Eight-brokens’, also called Bapo Painting (八破图), though well-known as a symbol of the prospering urban culture in the mid-19th century China, has a winding artistic genealogy which not only is highlighted by the eccentric Monk Liuzhou (1791-1858) but also extends to the renowned master Qian Xuan (1239-1299). With the rise of visual and material culture studies, more art historians have begun to focus on this topic, exemplified by the first-ever exhibition dedicated to ‘Eight-brokens’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2017). This article focuses on the remediation of ‘Eight-brokens’ through printing technologies and channels of mass communication. It aims to unveil and analyze the tension between art communication and ‘the original object in context’, by referring to discussions on global art history, particularly Wu Hung’s concept of historical materiality and Hans Belting’s interpretation of media in his Bild-anthropologie. The conclusion emphasizes that communication does not simply disseminate objects, techniques, styles or ideas of art, but also plays a more nuanced and fundamental role in the figuration of the deep time structure of art history, precisely because of the coexisting shaping and shearing forces of that tension.

In the early twentieth-century era of transnationalism, Cummings’ intermedial artistry works beyond the juxtapositional adoption of the ideogrammic method and draws from the holistic, integrative aesthetics of East-Asian verse, literati painting, and calligraphy – collectively known as the “three perfections.” This globalised paradigm catalyses his modernist verbal-visual experimentation, imbibing new energies across the historical binaries such as word and image, the hearable and the seeable, discourse and representation, signification and resemblance, and the West and the East. He started rediscovering his (inter)artistic role as a “Poet-Painter of China” by following the Poundian translation of Chinese philosophies and East-Asian aesthetics. To highlight Cummings’ innovative poetics of “poempicturality,” this paper will examine the idiosyncratic facets of his “poempictures” – the coinage of a syntactically abstract yet pictorially concretised artform – by situating them within the compositional lineage, especially, of Chinese ink-and-wash paintings and calligraphic works. As a subjectivist creator, Cummings transforms his alphabetic and semiotic prosody into a stylistic re-presentation of formal or structural ideographism that resonates with the gestural, virtuoso brushwork of Chinese classical artifice. Through this radical process, this modernist poet-painter prioritises the self-expressive articulation of one’s experience, recollection, and the “IS” of being/becoming, over the mimetic or sentimental reflection of perceptible realities. Cummings’ prosodic intermediality, thus, is not enclosed to just generic innovation but extends to a cross-cultural engagement with mediums and their constitutional expressiveness. Instead of conforming with a fixed or singular mediation, his “poempictures” celebrates the aliveness, reconfiguration, and self-transcendence which ontologically foregrounds an ever-shifting, pluralistic conceptualisation of selves and their relational agency in-between.

"Journey to the West", a masterpiece of Chinese classical literature, boasts rich story content and vivid character portrayals. It has been widely disseminated through various media forms after hundreds of years of inheritance and development. This study focuses on the cross-media communication of "Journey to the West" in animated films, delving into its communication characteristics, influencing factors, and significance in the context of the new era. By analyzing animated films of "Journey to the West" from different periods, this study finds that while retaining the classic plots and character images of the original work, these films continuously incorporate new elements and creativity to cater to the aesthetic needs of audiences in different times. From early traditional hand-drawn animation to today's computer animation technology, animated films of "Journey to the West" have seen significant improvements in image quality, visual effects, and narrative styles. At the same time, cross-media communication has further expanded and extended the stories and characters of "Journey to the West" into other related fields, such as animation merchandising, theme parks, online games, and more, forming a vast cultural industry chain. The cross-media communication of "Journey to the West" in animated films not only contributes to the inheritance and promotion of traditional Chinese culture, enabling more people to understand and appreciate this classic work, but also provides important resources and impetus for the development of China's cultural industry. Through cross-media communication, the cultural value of "Journey to the West" has been further enhanced, and its influence has continued to expand, making it one of the key windows for Chinese culture to go to the world.

In the 1950s Hong Kong – a British colony caught between Cold War ideologies and fading imperialism – the left-wing Cantonese film adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1955) reimagines Dickens’s class critique into an overt indictment of colonial capitalism and postcolonial modernity. By recasting Pip as Fuqun, a blacksmith turned pharmacist, the film reframes Victorian social mobility as Hong Kong’s struggle under dual oppressions: colonial hierarchies and capitalist exploitation. More to the point, the adaptation positions medicine as a tool for socialist progress yet corrupted by profit-driven commodification. Dickens’s moral concerns are amplified by positioning Fuqun’s medical career as resistance. Fuqun’s shift from individual ambition to communal care critiques not just class inequality but colonial modernity’s moral decay. The “doctor-healer” trope for collective progress, common in left-wing lunlipian (social ethic films), becomes a postcolonial counter-narrative, advocating science as a socialist praxis against colonial-capitalist alienation. Also, the audience was addressed as active participants in social reflection and moral construction. By rerouting Fuqun’s ambitions from bourgeois self-advancement to communal care, the film interrogates not only class struggle but also the cultural contradictions of a colony aspiring to socialist modernity amidst residual imperial frameworks. Therefore, the transnational adaptation serves as a mediator of anti-colonial socialist discourse. It reveals how Hong Kong’s left-wing cinema reimagined socialist ideals as tools to suture the wounds of a society torn between colonial legacies, capitalist pressures, and socialist futures.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ politico-economic writings have profoundly shaped global leftist political praxis and cultural production. In Germany, leftist writers and artists have continuously reinterpreted Marx and Engels’ theoretical texts in response to shifting political contexts, often mirroring broader historical transformations in German society. During the rise of the Nazi regime, Bertolt Brecht sought to artistically reframe Das Kommunistische Manifest as a poem, while Alexander Kluge reimagined Marx’s Das Kapital in his 2008 documentary film as a response to the global financial crises and the resurgence of capitalist contradictions. Both artists used media to evoke political emotions during times of crisis, exploring the role of media forms in mediating revolutionary affects. This paper brings Brecht and Kluge into dialogue and examines how political emotions are closely intertwined with media forms in German leftist cultural production. It focuses on the transmedial engagements that arise when Marxist theory is reworked across different media. In particular, it asks how diverse media forms serve to mediate, articulate, and disseminate political emotions within their respective historical and cultural contexts. By tracing these transmedial encounters, this paper highlights the ongoing relevance and adaptation of Marxist thought in German cultural production and its role in shaping political affect in times of crisis and transformation.

The academic community has already widely recognized the intermedia writing in the work The Unconsoled. This paper explores the relationship between the artistic philosophy and political justice conveyed by Kazuo Ishiguro in his intermedia writing. The small Central European city in the novel is plunged into an inexplicable crisis, and the citizens place high hopes on art, especially expecting the arrival of the protagonist, Ryder, to resolve this crisis. However, Ryder’s absurd experiences seem to confirm Plato’s view that art should be banished from the “Republic”. However, the exploration of various musical genres and art forms in the novel, along with its polyphonic writing and Kafkaesque experimental style, illustrates the close relationship between art and politics. The paradox of the use of art is shown in a humorous way, implying a contest between dependent art and autonomous art. The novel suggests that dependent art, represented by mass art, weakens the perceptual consciousness of the people. Commercial temptation and political manipulation lead people into a state of being unconsolable. Meanwhile, the people in crisis have already begun to develop a consciousness of change under the enlightenment of modern/postmodern music, experiencing painful metamorphosis, seeking the path to future freedom and happiness, and striving to build a just and good life.

American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson and adapted from Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), tells the story a novelist named Thelonius “Monk” Ellison whose anonymously published stereotype-catering book brings him unexpected commercial success.

As an adapted film, it exemplifies the double meaning of the verb “adapt” - to change behavior to fit in a place or a situation, or to change an artistic form to another. This article thus carries out a twofold analysis of adaptation: the adapted film not only reproduce the meta narratives in the novel, but also exhibits how Monk adapts his “not black enough” self to the stereotypical assumptions held by others concerning his race. The film can in this sense be considered as a meta-adaptation (i.e., an adaptation that highlights the concept of adaptation in itself) in which adaptation is discussed from both an intermedial perspective and a sociocultural one. The two aspects are inextricably joint as they shed light on each other. I borrow Lars Elleström’s definition of adaptation as transmediation that stresses the adapting process rather than considering it a unidirectional procedure. Correspondingly, the adaptation of a racial identity is also established not by the performer alone, but by audience’s participation with collective imagination and memories, rendering the adaptation a dialectic mechanism. The outcome of adaptation (a film adaptation of a novel/an identity performance) is not an unchanging termination. Instead, it leaves an impact on the source of adaptation (the novel/the original self identity) as it creates new meaning and opens up channels to new significance. Ultimately, this article proposes to examine adaptation as an active contributor to the weaving of a network of significance through self-reflexive mediality and self-conscious racial performance.

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013) explores the protagonist Theo’s journey through trauma, identity formation, and ethical dilemmas, with visual imagery and the gaze as central themes. The novel intertwines the narrative of Theo’s growth with the iconic painting The Goldfinch, using art as a symbol for Theo’s internal struggles and evolving identity. Key paintings, such as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and Boy with a Skull, play significant roles in shaping Theo’s ethical consciousness.

The dynamic between Theo and the portraits he views—where the paintings seem to gaze back at him—offers a unique ethical perspective. Unlike typical subject-object gazes, these portraits engage the viewer in a reciprocal interaction, blurring the lines between observer and observed. This "gaze" becomes a metaphor for Theo’s self-examination and identity reconstruction, as the paintings challenge him to confront his past and make ethical decisions.

Portraiture, with its active gaze and spiritual resonance, guides Theo through his ethical struggles, prompting him to reevaluate his choices and develop a new sense of belonging. Through his encounters with these paintings, Theo redefines his relationship with himself and others, ultimately finding redemption and a clearer ethical path. The novel’s use of visual art suggests that the act of viewing is not passive but an active, ethical behavior that reshapes one’s identity.

This paper, informed by Nancy’s theory of artistic gaze, examines how the protagonist’s search for self-identity is mediated through visual ethics. By exploring Theo’s interactions with portraiture, this study offers a new perspective on the novel’s exploration of identity, ethics, and the power of visual culture in shaping our moral choices.

The poetry of New York School poet Frank O’Hara is often discussed within intermedial contexts, but mostly limited to the intermedial connections between his poetry and painting. However, a closer examination reveals that the pictorial quality in O’Hara’s poetry is fundamentally connected to performance. This connection is rooted, on one hand, in the tradition of American poetry since Walt Whitman, and on the other hand, deeply influenced by historical avant-garde artists. Additionally, the intermedial performance of O'Hara's poetry also has its unique contemporary socio-cultural context, namely the rise of neo avant-garde art and the post-war American consumer culture, and the intermedial performance of his poetry manifests as a tension between the embodied performance and the spectacle performance of mass media.

In the face of a folk art world in the 1960s that was confined to political propaganda and “unplugged” forms, Bob Dylan emphasized the dynamic production of poetry through stage performance. Bob Dylan's performance practice on stage, as art generated by language, pulls poetry out of its textual framework and infuses it with musicality, liveness and performativity. According to John Searle's discourse on the performativity of language, it is clear that all language is a form of action, and Bob Dylan's performances begin with language and end with action. Performativity is expressed in Bob Dylan's art as “events” that serve as transitions and changes, which breaks with Derrida's claim that performance is the power of quotation and repetition, and seeks to balance the stylized repetition of meaning with the resistance that is generated by repetition. Bob Dylan's tour of upwards of 3,000 shows exemplifies the dialectic of repetition and subversion in performativity, demonstrating the same source lyrics and divergent individual experiences for performances in different situations and contexts, the performativity of these performances is at once quotative and at the same time interventionist and resistant to quotability. Bob Dylan moves back and forth between the triple space of text, song, and stage, radically merging poetry, chant, and performance to recapture the sensual aesthetics of folk art and simplicity. These poetic performances form Bob Dylan's artistic autonomy in a way that marginalizes the hegemony, creates a symbiotic experience of identity between the audience and the singer in performance scenarios across time and space, and generates positively divergent forces within an audience with differences in gender, class, ethnicity, and geography, thus dissolving the paradoxes that arise within performativity.... -referential stylistic repetition and resistance to pre-existing styles. Bob Dylan and the audience perform poetry to generate a new type of narrative that is different from the lyrics and the experience of the audience, where the story sung by the singer is highly integrated with the personal experience of the audience, transcending the didactic values of good and evil, and thus liberating the audience from the constraints of the distributive experience. Against the backdrop of Hans Lehmann's “theatricalization of space,” Bob Dylan, both poet and singer, emphasizes that poetry is theatrical in nature, and that the space in which a song is performed is a situation in which the internal structure of the theatre has been transmogrified, thus activating the theatrical effect of poetry.

This study examines the emergence of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry performance in the context of the post-World War II revival of modernism. It traces Ginsberg’s engagement with both the Beat Generation coterie and a broader cultural sphere, analyzing his deviation from conventional textuality in the framework of New Criticism. Emphasizing spontaneous creation and performative practice, the study explores his interactions with various artists and art collectives, highlighting the manifestation of his "shock" aesthetics as a means of sensory stimulation and transcendence of everyday life. Through the lens of voicing impulse, presence, and performance space, this research investigates how Ginsberg’s work engages with diverse media forms, revealing innovative avenues in poetic expression. Furthermore, the study explores the transformation of Ginsberg’s poetry performance in response to technological media and religious influences, considering how it engages with and influences social politics and popular culture. Drawing upon influence studies and inter-media theory, the paper situates Ginsberg’s poetry performance within the broader genealogies of modernism, lyric poetry, and 20th-century cultural history.

Kleist’s queer marionettes (1810), Haraway’s anti-identitarian cyborgs (1985), and Murakami’s wind-up bird (1994) offer us instances of post-human glitches that resist normalizations despite their embodied precarities. Hardt and Negri’s “new post-human bodies (Empire 2013) and Latour’s confrontation of “the time of the Anthropocene” (2014) demand a remapping of the human as conventionally traced, in order to recognize it as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). The Comparative Gender Studies Research Committee invites presentations on both earlier and contemporary materials related to the congress theme “Technology and Comparative Literature.” We particularly encourage submissions from scholars, writers, and activists that investigate how expressive artists represent, challenge, and reflect the lived experiences of those with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and/or mental health conditions when considered in relation to gender and sexuality. We seek papers reflecting the diverse experiences and narratives of marginalized groups, especially those from 2SLGBTQI+ and BIPOC communities We will attend to technology in both our potentially posthuman virtuality as well as earlier moments of simulacra through interrogating all 6 terms: precarious, mediation, queer, body, virtual, and space. Mindful that a session on precarity offered in the privileged context of an international congress needs to adopt a position of allyship and avow its positionality, this session will recognize those who for various reasons are unable to be present. Papers might consider precarious labor, contrareproductivity, queer temporality, homonationalism, queer counterpublics, queering technological affordances, cooptation and fragility, queering conventional technologies, transmediation, queer play and gaming, fanfiction and queer networks, affect and ambivalence, technologies of identity, queer(ing) AI.

As the war in Ukraine moves into its third year, interrogations of its effects on the lives of those directly involved with the conflict offer outside observers poignant, often painful, glimpses into how human process and emerge from the trauma of war. This paper examines two Ukrainian cultural projects that offer two distinct approaches and perspectives on responding to the aftermaths of war: the film «Східний фронт» [Eastern Front] (2023), Manskij and Titarenko, dirs., and current performances of “Cultural Forces,” a musical ensemble of active-duty Ukrainian soldiers. Each of these provocative texts offers a distinctive approach to how its Ukrainian actors have been affected by the war during its first two years. Eastern Front uses the documentary film genre to portray the human cost of the war through depictions of the treatment to animal “victims” caught in the conflict. The group “Cultural Forces” uses a narrative concert format for its soldier/musicians to perform their trauma in front of its audiences. Questioning anthropocentric methodology (Callicott 2002) as hegemonic in favor instead of critical pluralism, or a “studying up” perspective (Plumwood 2002), which encourages self-reflection and contemplation of the human condition, the paper considers how each of these texts succeeds in relating the posthuman in its own vernacular. It considers the place of the human and nonhuman animals in conveying and processing the trauma of war and how disparate posthuman approaches to trauma can succeed in creating spaces for critical pluralism in their performances.

In this paper I trace the queer negotiations of love, loneliness, queerness, and disability in two speculative fiction novels: Kazuo Ishiguro's 2021 science fiction novel Klara and the Sun and Ottessa Moshfegh's 2022 dark fantasy novel Lapvona. Specifically, I argue that both novels deploy their respective SF generic conventions to queer and render ambivalent the desire for interpersonal intimacy and love through a process whereby an object otherwise understood as interior-such as selfhood or love-is offloaded onto a setting, plot, or set of narrative circumstances that are other than the logics of the so-called real world. Both Klara and Lapvona, I argue, have a unique investment in speculatively externalizing love through an unrequited love for an Other of cosmic scale: Klara, the robot narrator of Ishiguro's novel, loves the Sun and Marek, the deformed boy at the center of Lapvona, desperately seeks the love of God. In both novels, I read love as being arrived at through a counterintuitive, complete elimination of the self, and such elimination of the self in turn being mediated by the speculative contexts for each novel's narrative. Klara's nature as a robot renders her outside the central love story she has been programmed to support as an "artificial friend" and the sociopolitical structure of Marek's medieval fiefdom corrodes the possibility of connection between people. However, I finally present such externalization as intimately intertwined with a queer and disabled mode of being and suggest that speculative externalization has much to contribute to queer theory and disability studies, with Klara and Marek experiencing disability and impairment as well as engaging in queer attachments to other characters, to their cosmic Others, and to themselves. Of special interest to this end are Ahmed's queer critique of happiness, Halberstam's queer failure, and Kafer's and Muñoz's respective figurations of futurity, both crip and queer. It is through the disruption of normative emotional and physical movement through the world-from Klara's malfunctioning and her distant interpretation of, but fierce investment in, human affect, to Marek's belief that physical pain and cruelty are themselves signifiers of loving connection—that Ishiguro and Moshfegh present modes of intimacy, loving, and connection that are uniquely speculative, queer, and crip.

The finite dimensions of the relationship between man and woman have been prescribed by man and not by woman. Modern woman prefers to exercise- her choice and break away from her traumatic experiences. Women are now portrayed as more assertive, more liberated in their view and more articulate in their expression than the women of the past. Instead of suffering at the hands of her husbands or other males, she has started asserting her identity. Whether it is Devi of Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night, Sarita of Shashi Deshpande's The Dark Holds No Terrors, Lucy of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Chantal of Milan Kundera's Identity, the women have established a coherent class structure- one of assertion of identity and defiance of male supremacy and protest at being subordinated by man.

Devi, the protagonist of Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night, is unable to stand her husband's non-recognition of her abilities. She is married to a Regional Manager of a multinational company and she is to him just a woman – a woman to be tried down to house hold chores, a woman who has no right to aspire to become anybody other than a full time housewife. Devi leaves Mahesh, unable to cope up with his attitudes; she runs away from home to Gopal, her neighbour's brother. But here, too she finds herself suffocated. And ultimately she defies and leaves him too to live in her own home by the sea.

Margaret Atwood is one of the pioneer of contemporary Canadian women fiction in English. Her The Edible Woman became the epoch making voice owing to her abiding commitment for women's identity, the layers and levels of consciousness in a male – chauvinistic society and the myriad meanings of men-women encounter. It is considered to be a manifesto of postcolonial women sensibility and sensitivity where states of marginality and 'otherness' are seen as sources of energies for potential change and progress. Atwood explores the themes like victimization and survival, the question of female identity, the politics of gender alienation of women in a male dominated society, the narrow delimiting definition of a woman and her function in society and man's attempt to destroy the self-hood of women. It is through the character of Marian, the writer has exhibited that a woman will be consumed if she projects herself as an 'edible' object.

The paper intends to present a comparative stance of the two novels – Githa Hariharan's The Thousand Faces of Night and Atwood's The Edible Woman. On the one hand Hariharan depicts the male domination, the male unwillingness to identify Devi's individuality, while on the other Atwood has talked about the emergences of 'new woman', not as a consumer product but as a woman transforming the marginal experiences into a creative force. The paper will also analyse comparatively the perspectives of both the writers - Githa Hariharan and Margaret Atwood, the one from the Indian viewpoint and the other from the Canadian angle.

The classic science fiction film series Alien envisions reproduction as a violent collaboration between technology and biology, breaking traditional paradigms of gender, corporeality, and species boundaries. The Xenomorph’s reproductive mechanism operates through an automated biological drive. It parasitizes human hosts regardless of gender, thereby reducing the host body to a mere container and reproductive machine. This non-normative reproduction reveals a state of genderlessness or post-gender, constructing a queer maternal-fetal structure. Focusing on the fourth film in the series: Alien: Resurrection, this paper explores, on the one hand, how technology reshapes and alters the perception and behavior of bodily existence, and how the mechanism of the body, reconstructed through technological and reproductive violence, challenges the phenomenology of embodiment. On the other hand, the paper examines the peremptory reshaping of Ripley’s body through cloning technologies and the mutation of the Xenomorph Queen’s reproductive mechanism, ultimately resulting in a hybrid, fluid existence—a posthuman assemblage, which is capable of reconfiguring itself in response to environmental or internal tensions. Nevertheless, the paper emphasizes how this reproductive mechanism and Ripley’s multifaceted identities destabilize the normative binary structures of gender and reproduction, pointing to a queered marginality and vulnerability. This not only blurs the boundaries between the biological and the mechanical, the human and the alien, and gender and subjectivity but also redefines the materiality and expressivity of the body. Drawing on queer gender theory, media analysis, and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “assemblage,” this paper situates the Alien series within broader discourses on the ethics of technology. It reinterprets how sci-fi narratives transcend the boundaries of biology and technology, gender and body, creating multidimensional and fluid posthuman imaginaries.

In September 1935, Lin Yutang published an English article titled "Feminist Thought in Ancient China" in T’ien Hsia Monthly, where he introduced three men, he considered ancient Chinese feminists: Yu Zhengxie, Yuan Mei, and Li Ruzhen. Among them, Lin highlighted well-known scholar Yuan Mei, portraying him as a social pioneer advocating for women's rights. Writing for Western-educated Chinese intellectuals and English speakers in China, Lin’s works and translations mediated China and the West, facilitating traditional Chinese knowledge flow worldwide and shaping perceptions of China. Lin’s feminist view notably influenced Sinologist Robert van Gulik. In the postscript of The Chinese Gold Murders, van Gulik discussed how he incorporated Lin’s article in his conceptualization of Judge Dee’s progressive stance on women’s voices in Chapter Fifteen. Many scholars have similarly regarded Lin as a cultural bridge between China and the West and accepted his characterization of Yuan Mei as a feminist. However, Goyama Kiwamu’s research concluded that Yuan Mei’s literary thought stemmed from his haose (lust for man and woman), in which Yuan objectified both men and women as subjects of sexual desire. Yuan Mei used to say that reading a good poetry sentence is like watching a beautiful lady. According to Kiwamu’s research and Yuan Mei’s works, Yuan's opposition to foot-binding, advocacy for women’s rights, and critique of Confucianism do not stem from feminist ideals but due to Yuan’s sexual desire, thus leading to his patronage of women. This raises critical questions: why did Lin portray Yuan Mei as a feminist? What motivated him to interpret Yuan’s thoughts in a feminist fashion? Despite the distance between Yuan’s writings as well as actions and feminist ideals, why did Lin Yutang cast a feminist light on Yuan Mei and introduce Yuan Mei as a pioneering Chinese “feminist” to English readers in the 1930s?

This research investigates a Chinese television drama adapted from a novel by Yi Shu, a distinguished Hong Kong novelist, titled The Story of Roses (玫瑰的故事). The study aims to elucidate the inherent tensions and challenges associated with postfeminism in China. It analyzes the production, circulation, and consumption of this drama online to demonstrate that shifting intimate relationships, evolving political, economic, and technological conditions within the media industry, and broader social transformations have fostered postfeminist subjectivity in Chinese television. Specifically, in line with neoliberal transitions, women confined to domestic and private spheres are increasingly portrayed as responsible for their own circumstances. This research seeks to examine the construction of the postfeminist subjectivity of the female protagonist Huang Yimei through her romantic relationships. It also investigates how The Story of Roses has embedded and perpetuated the entrenched hierarchical division between productive and reproductive labor, thereby constructing the myth of postfeminism in post-socialist China workplace. Furthermore, this study outlines a framework of feeling for contemporary Chinese women who aspire to achieve autonomy, independence, and social status within Chinese society.

In societies where human and non-human collide to remap the experience of being, queer literature has been particularly active by reappropriation simulacra as a resistance power to the “polishing” of spaces. Queer literature embraces ambivalence and affect, for they disrupt linearity. While virtuality is usually understood as a non-affective technology enabled through specific devices, I propose to read queer novels as “virtual spaces” in that virtuality itself is the remapping of spaces beyond the human to tackle binarity through the complex entanglement of affect, environment, and precarity. Two novels approach queer precarity through non-human fragmentation: Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch (2022), which narrates the story of a non-binary person overcoming family trauma and boundaries through an osmosis with trees to allow another identity, and Camille Cornu’s Photosynthèses (2024), which tells of a non-binary person dissolving boundaries of humanity through an transformation with plants to fragment identity. Drawing on theoretical thinking by Preciado (Dysphoria Mundi), Muñoz (Cruising Utopia), and Ahmed (Queer Phenomenology), I will analyze the ambiguity of fragmentation: its precarity in front of a constantly absorbing normativity, its virtuality for a remapping of identity, its environmental multiplicity through queer temporality. As a way of opening for discussion, I will argue that the meditative resistance of these texts further highlights the necessity of remapping Comparative Literature beyond binary studies and for an unstable—precarious—method of reading virtual spaces.

Regularly viewed as creating characters so stylized that they both fall short of and exceed the category of the human, Oscar Wilde’s preoccupation with actual puppets, marionettes, and animated statues spans his career. Like the masks which for Wilde make truth possible by concealing the truth-sayer, these post-human bodies function ironically, providing the non-humanity which is the precondition for human expressivity. Nominally cisgender, male-identified characters seem to mimic modern scholarly dismissal of the puppet as both monstrous and empty in ways which paradoxically open a space for queer nostalgia through posthuman embodiment. From the early poem “The Harlot’s House” (1885) and short story “The Happy Prince” (1888) to mentions in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and De Profundis (1897), Wilde combines what Svetlana Boym has called “reflective nostalgia” with a disruption of the imagination and a queering of bodies that are transformed in Halberstam’s notion of “queer time” through the materiality of death and decay. In “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde explicitly invokes the Russian literary examples, especially Turgenev (whom Wilde translated) and Dostoevsky, that inspired his first play Vera, or the Nihilists (1883). He emphasizes the internal psychological complexity and idealistic nihilism out of which he creates his own artificial avatars. Wilde disrupts time and realistic embodiment so as transmit shared queer memories, given their lack of institutional space, so as to fashion possible imagined futures that exceed current paradigms. Drawing on both religious and socialist visions of utopia, Wilde anticipates Muñoz “dissidentification” with its recycling of a painful past so as to make possible the imagining of queer futures. London sex workers become undead dancing marionettes. A spoiled prince is transformed into a statue which a self-sacrificing swallow dismantles to feed the poor. Henry’s longing for lost beauty, Sybil’s self-destructive sincerity and Dorian’s blackmailing imagination, along with the superfluity of Shakespeare’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, are all metaphorically rendered as puppets. Unlike Wilde’s empty “leading men,” whether Russian czars, Danish princes, or English lords, their queer excessive affect is made possible precisely by their paired-down, fragile, broken, and extra-human bodies.

The university space offers to the students, emerging out of the panopticon schools, a new sense of liberty, and alongwith it opportunities to express and explore themselves. In India, students usually enter the university at the end of puberty, and at the age of majority—having to navigate the newfound space and self, often using new media of communication: the digital social media being prominent among them. The University of Delhi, one of the country’s premier higher educational institutions, is one such diverse and complex space, comprising of students coming from different backgrounds, including those from the sexual and gender minorities. The intersectionality of queerness and the social media when analysed in context of these students assumes a distinct significance.

This paper attempts to explore the multifarious dimensions of queerness, and its expression on the social media by looking at the University of Delhi and its student population, and the extent to which they daily use the digital medium to articulate their queer identity in a campus that remains extremely heteronormative and patriarchal even after the reading down of Section 377. The paper for this purpose shall analyse the social media handles of various societies and queer collectives that function in the various constituent colleges of the University, exploring whether such platforms provide any viable safe space for queer companionship, intimacies and solidarities. It shall also problematize the relationship between queerness and digital space by noting the case of the Hindu College Straight Pride Collective that had surfaced on Instagram spreading queer-phobia online against queer students.

The paper shall seek to understand the processes and the experience of students, who belong to the LGBTQIA+ spectrum and use the digital space, through recorded testimonials (gathered by means of an interview questionnaire created using Google Form and circulated among the students through the social media platforms, following strict norms of maintaining the respondents’ confidentiality). The paper shall develop a nuanced approach, building its arguments on the basis of existing critical studies from that of Michel Foucault to Sam Miles, attempting to understand whether or not a manifestation of queer companionship, resistance and community-building is possible among the student population of an Indian University over social media, looking at ways in which marginal groups interact everyday, negotiate in university spaces dominated by the heteronormative majority, and use digital media platforms in potentially subversive ways.

Nüshu is the only syllabic script in the history of humanity that is designed and used by women only. Meaning “female writing”, nüshu was arguably developed in the 13th century by the peasant women in Jiangyong County in Southern China. In the pre-Liberation patriarchal agrarian community that would deny women education and learn the official Chinese hanzi characters, nüshu became a ‘secret’ mechanism for women to give voice to the experiences and emotions of kelian, the miserable, the oppressed and powerless women of the community. An updated version of my 2022 paper, the present paper situates nüshu vis-à-vis the tradition of woman-words. I used the phrase ‘woman-words’ to designate the languages, language uses and paralanguages that women around the world have formed and used. The title of this paper refers to a comment by one of my students who, in their bid to assert a decolonial stance after my talk on nüshu, said, “so, before écriture féminine there was Nüshu!”. My paper broaches the critical-affective features of that statement in order to explore the tradition of woman-words in the world.

Abstract: Female bodies as sites of contestation and censure have garnered much critical attention. Conditioned to fit into predefined notions of femininity, feminist movements find the systemic control of female bodies an especially challenging territory to manoeuvre. Female autonomy has been at loggerheads with social desire to contain and manipulate women into submission. This study analyses the nuances of this manipulation through an analysis of female appetites and the implicit social fear that necessitates a stringent monitoring of female bodies. The two selected Asian literary texts, foreground the causal trajectory and consequent implications of women’s assertion over their food choice, portion size and consumption pattern. Isabelle Lorey’s theorization of Governmentality through Precarization and Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoys (Affect Aliens) form the methodological lens for situating the role of vulnerability in making bodies governable. To locate the site of the festering wound of female anger and suppressed desire and to contextualise their response to neoliberal suppression of their bodies, the role of Haan (roughly suppressed anger) shall be studied to understand their individual response to collective oppression.

The Russian Sinologist Boris L. Riftin mainly adopted the perspective of historical evolution and Russian literary theories to compare and summarize the motifs and plots of the stories about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and explored the influence of written literature in the Middle Ages and afterwards on oral creations. The feature of his research lies in the systematic study of the smallest plot units of the works. During the long historical evolution of the stories about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the rewriting by literati gave birth to cross-media and multi-genre works about the Three Kingdoms among the folk, such as Transformation Texts (Bianwen), Pinghua (Storytelling), New Year pictures, and Traditional Operas.This is a manifestation of living cross-media literature. Meanwhile, the analysis of character images is the key to the study of the stories about the Three Kingdoms. This article will combine Riftin's research and relevant commentaries, and utilize the theory of cross-media literature to sort out and summarize the Russian Sinologist Boris L. Riftin's research on the character images of the stories about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in different genres. It will also explore how he used the perspective of historical evolution to study the mutual relationship between literati literature and folk literature, compare how the expressions and descriptive ways of the stories in different genres transitioned from purely written media literature to oral media literature, further analyze how the character images of the story combined with folk religious beliefs in the process of cross-media dissemination and evolution, and how Sinologists unearthed the internal cultural metaphors of the character images of the story from the cross-media perspective.

Abstract: Su Shi’s proposition of “creative ideas go beyond the law” （出新意于法度）and “permanent principle being superior to constant form”（无常形而有常理） is the embodiment of the principle of “Tao conditioned by Nature”（道法自然） in artistic creation. The translation and interpretation of Su Shi’s art spirit in American art history is based on the principle in the painting practice. Scholars such as Osvald Siren, Susan Bush, Driscoll, George Rowley, etc. have been assigned the missions to translate and interpret the empirical and perceptive theories of Chinese art. Their research not only involved the understanding and interpretation of the fundamental similarities between art creation and natural world, but different opinions were put forward on the translation methods of the core concepts, such as 势(force or shi), 生动(life movement or shengdong) , which provided a reference for the development of western art theory, contributing to the development of Chinese art theory in foreign lands.

The animated fairy tale film, as a specific type of film genre, combines an important feature shared by fairy tale and animated film - ‘transformation’. From a metaphorical perspective, this feature promotes an imaginative experience and understanding of the historical past. In this paper, we take the folklore of Cinderella as a case study of the theoretical discussions triggered by the dissemination of European fairy tales and American Disney animated films. As one of the most widely circulated classic fairy tales in the world, the collection, dissemination and adaptation of the Cinderella story has been a modernisation process, with enchantment and exorcism reflecting the complexity of its modernity. Through the re-creation of animated films, the modern understanding of transformation provides a pertinent window for the examination of the relationship between folk fairy tales and animated films in the perspective of globalisation. Based on literature on fairy tales and animated filmes, especially Disney animated fairy tale films, this paper examines the significance of “transformation” in metaphorically bridging past and present, and in understanding the interplay between representation and expression. The transformation of animated fairy tale films raises a problem of imaginative identity that we might call the rewriting of memories in the age of globalization. Therefore, this is a journey of searching for historical significance, through Disney, beyond Disney, into the generation of new historical meanings. This, we hope, is a historical memory that future animated fairy tale films might have.

After the introduction of “Everlasting Regret”, a poem by the Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi, into Japan, it not only had a profound impact on Japanese literature but was also reshaped through other artistic mediums, undergoing a process of re-classicization and becoming one of the themes in Japanese artistic creation. The Edo period marked the transformation of the theme of “Everlasting Regret” from aristocratic literature to popular art. During this period, the theme underwent an aesthetic shift towards secularization and popularization in the process of cross-artistic adaptation. Its emotional core also shifted from sorrow to joy, generating new vitality. This article, from an inter-media perspective and in conjunction with the historical background, analyzes the paintings, decorations, and musical works themed around “Everlasting Regret” during the Edo period, revealing the profound influence of the story of “Everlasting Regret” on the rise of the merchant class and the integration of Japanese popular culture in the Edo period.