Global Humanities Junior Research and Teaching Stay at The Johns Hopkins University

August - November 2015

The current research project focus on the discursive construction of femininity and gender roles and images against the backdrop of social and economic changes in China since the 1990s. The research is based on an analysis of contemporary Chinese women counselor books. They reflect social practices and processes of communicative constructions of everyday knowledge and procedures of transformation and stabilization of symbolic orders and norms on institutional and individual level. Therefore, the study aims social processes, in which „gender“ and „femininity“ is created and distributed as a social normative category. With the focus on social (re)produced images of femininity as „embodied practices“ in popular gender narratives, we can see contingencies and effects of institutional reflexivity as a negotiation process balancing social structure and individual action strategies.

Anett Dippner has earned her Master in Sinology, Theater and Media Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen and finished her PhD on contemporary female identities in Chinese media at Freie Universitaet Berlin. She worked as an Assistant Professor at Goethe Universitaet Frankfurt am Main and at Freie Universitaet Berlin, where she is currently a research fellow at the Institute of China Studies. Her research interests include all kind of social transformation and phenomena in contemporary China, gender and women studies, Chinese art and calligraphy and media studies. Among her publications, there is a monograph about Chinese modern calligraphy (Zeichen der Zeit, 2009) and an anthology on transnational receptions of philosophical ideas (Kritische Verhältnisse, 2009).