On the 20th of September we are happy to welcome Jinyan Zeng to Human Rights Lunch online! Log in to Zoom in https://lu-se.zoom.us/j/65437566996 at 12:15-13:00 and enjoy your lunch while listening to the seminar where Jinyan Zeng will let us in on the concepts of Autoethnography and First-person filmmaking, followed by short film clips of documentary films made by women including Jinyan Zeng herself. The focus during the seminar will be on women living under political violence, market exploitation, and gender pressure. Through reflecting on themes and processes of documentary filmmaking and distribution, Jinyan Zeng highlights the unique way of women’s expression in social contestation, artistic representation, and intellectual debate.
One of the films Jinyan has contributed to and will be discussing during the seminar is A Poem to Liu Xia, a short film made on International Women’s Day 2015 in collaboration with Zeng Jinyan (writer, Hong Kong) and Liao Yiwu (Composer/Performer, Berlin). This short film is a tribute for the Chinese Artist Liu Xia, then wife, now widow, to the 2010 Nobel Peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo. The film was done when Liu Xia was under house arrest in Beijing without charge to remind us all that Liu Xia’s art may be forbidden in China but she is not forgotten.
Jinyan Zeng is also a codirector for the documentary film Outcry and Whisper together with Wen Hai and Trish McAdam. The documentary film shows the oppression and resistance of women in mainland China and Hong Kong over a time period of 8 years. You can read a discussion on the documentary film in this transcribed conversation between Jinyan Zeng, Trish McAdam and Gina Marchetti. You can also read Gina Marchetti’s book chapter, The Alienated Gaze and the Activist Eye: Gender, Class, and Politics in Lotus (2012) and Outcry and Whisper (2020) of the subject in Women Filmmakers and the Visual Politics of Transnational China in the #MeToo Era. For further reading, Jinyan Zeng has recently published an article on Asian Ethnicity about Visualising the Post-2000s Inland Tibet Class Generation: Female Authorship and Renegotiation of Ethnicity.
Dr. Jinyan Zeng 曾金燕 works at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden. She is a scholar and documentary filmmaker. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality, culture and politics, intellectual identity and activism, and ethnicity, with a particular emphasis on the Chinese speaking world. Among various publications, she has authored Feminism and Genesis of Citizen Intelligentsia in China (in Chinese, 2016, City University of Hong Kong Press), co-edited Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere (with Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen, Forthcoming 2024, Bloomsbury), and co-directed documentary film Outcry and Whisper (2020, with Wen Hai and Trish McAdam).
See more of Jinyan Zeng’s new publications below:
2024. ‘Queering Community: Affect of Visuality in the Sinosphere’. Journal of Chinese Cinemas.
2024. ‘From Women’s Space to Gendering the Public Sphere: Ai Xiaoming’s Practice of Everyday Life and Activism’. In Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender & Sexuality, edited by Jamie J. Zhao and Hongwei Bao (Co-authored with Xibai Xu).
Forthcoming. Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere (Co-edited with Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen, Bloomsbury).
Forthcoming. ‘Literary Making of a Uyghur Feminist: Identity and Ethics in Banu’s Redemption’. In Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere, edited by Jinyan Zeng and Elisabeth L Engebretsen (Co-authored with Anonymous).
Book review
2024. ‘Weibo Feminism: Expression, Activism, and Social Media in China Aviva Wei Xue and Kate Rose’. The China Quarterly.
