Lecture | China Seminar
National language and feminist activism in Republican China: the 1924 Congress for the Advancement of Education
- Date
- Wednesday 15 April 2026
- Time
- Serie
- LIAS China Seminar
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.48
Abstract
How can we re-envision the construction of a national language from below, taking into account the diversity of voices involved in these reforms? Starting from the visit of a delegation of feminist teachers from Tianjin to the annual congress of the National Association for the Advancement of Education in Nanjing in July 1924, this talk retraces how feminist activists influenced debates on the unification of language in China from the late Qing into the early PRC period. As feminist critics took on patronymics, pronouns, orthographic reforms, and popular literacy, this talk asks: how did gender and language politics come to intersect in Republican China? How did these debates evolve across decades? And how can they help us in turn re-envision debates of our time beyond Eurocentric understandings of language and gender norms?
Biography
Coraline Jortay is a Research Fellow at the French Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a historian of modern China focusing on gender, translation, and language politics. Prior to joining CNRS in 2023, she was a Laming Junior Research Fellow at the Queen’s College, University of Oxford. She is currently finishing a monograph provisionally entitled “Beyond Her: Language and Gender Politics in Modern China.” A co-founder of the China Academic Network on Gender (CHANGE), she is also a published translator of contemporary Sinophone literature into French.