Report on the HERA-SINGLE workshop in Shanghai “Precariously Yours – Gender, Class, and Urbanity in Contemporary Shanghai”, December 4-6, 2014. This section features the programme, information on the speakers, their talks and on the accompanying art exhibition “Precariously Yours”.
The workshop ‘Precariously Yours: Gender, Class, and Urbanity in Contemporary Shanghai’ took place between December 4-6 2014 in various locations in Shanghai. In this workshop we have extended the notion of precarity towards the domains of gender, love and sexuality. The topic ‘single women’ served as a prism to explore the complexities which surround precarity, urbanity and class. The HERA SINGLE members and their invited guests aimed at answering the following questions: How do single women negotiate the multiple expectations and demands that society imposes upon them? What are their tactics of resistance against normative gender roles and expectations? How do they negotiate the gendering of urban space? How to love in a city that never stays the same? How to navigate through the city, as a young woman without getting lost or feeling unsafe? How to imagine the city as a more intimate and fragile space? What is to be lost and gained in remaining a single woman?
The workshop zoomed in on how tropes like shengnü (leftover women) can be read as imaginations of a ‘new’ Asian femininity, how different modes of love and desire are explored in diverse creative and sexual cultures in Asian cities, and how art and activism attempt to intervene in hegemonic understandings of love, gender and sexuality.
Here you can download the programme flyer of the SINGLE workshop (Pdf, 0.4 Mb).
Further information
The HERA SINGLE project is funded by the European Union.
