Tianran Zhang | Fluid Heterotopias: Gendered Bodies and Spaces in Modern British and Chinese Women’s Writing
Tianran Zhang | Fluid Heterotopias: Gendered Bodies and Spaces in Modern British and Chinese Women’s Writing | University of Amsterdam | Supervisors: Dr. Ben Moore and Prof. Dr. Carrol Clarkson | 1 September 2021 — 1 September 2025.
This project focuses on gendered bodies and spaces in modern British and Chinese women’s writing and examines how they perform as sites that inspire female consciousness and accommodate alternative modernities. Drawing on Michel Foucault and Elizabeth Grosz’s theories on geography, space and the body, it analyzes how the narratives of interactions between gendered bodies and spaces shift across the 1900s to the 1960s, thereby revealing how female individuals are positioned in the grid of power relations and how they can transform spatial hierarchies and demonstrate alternatives to the dominant narratives of patriarchy, hierarchy, and colonialism.