Humanities in Asia: Women's Trans Cinema in Taiwan: "As We Like It"
About this Event
About the Talk
Women's cinema encompasses female-led films or narratives that focus on women’s experiences. It also includes films that target female audiences. As We Like It (Jieda huanxi, 2021) is an important milestone for Taiwanese women’s cinema. Shot on the heels of the 2019 legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan, As We Like It envisions a post-gender future. Taiwan was the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, initiating a new mode of coalition politics.
The all-female cast does away with such binary gender accessories as mustaches or wigs. It presents characters of all genders (played by actors identifying as women) matter-of-factly without apology or additional justification. Thematizing mixed-race and transgender practices, the queer film (in Mandarin, Taiwanese, and French) presents gender as a translational practice.
Gender becomes legible or illegible in new ways when translated into different languages. It is commonly assumed that some ideas are lost in translation. We can instead think of transness and translation as a concept through which embodied experiences evolve into social signs for interpretation.
Join Professor Joubin for this illustrated presentation and discover the latest in women’s cinema.
Free lunch will be offered at this talk. Doors will open no sooner than 15 minutes before the start time.
The Elliott School can coordinate with the university to reasonably accommodate most disabilities. If you need specific accommodations, please contact the Sigur Center at [email protected]. Requests should be made as soon as possible, but at least three days prior to the program to ensure accommodation.
About the Speaker
Alexa Alice Joubin teaches in the English department, is an affiliated faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and co-founded the GW Digital Humanities Institute. She directed the Dean's Scholars in Shakespeare (a signature program of GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences). At MIT, she is co-founder and co-director of the open-access Global Shakespeares digital performance archive. Her publications can be accessed on ResearchGate.
Her teaching and publications are unified by a commitment to understanding the mobility of early modern and postmodern cultures in their literary, performative, and digital forms of expression. Her research has been funded by the Fulbright, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, International Shakespeare Association, Folger Institute, and other agencies.
Her latest books include Race (co-authored; Routledge New Critical Idiom series), Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance (co-edited; Palgrave), and Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (co-edited; Palgrave). She is co-general editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook, and has guest-edited special issues of the journals Shakespeare: Journal of the British Shakespeare Association, Asian Theatre Journal, and Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. She received the MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, an honorable mention of NYU’s Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre, and the International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS) Colleagues’ Choice Award.
She chaired the MLA committee on the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare and edits the Palgrave-Macmillan book series on “Global Shakespeares”. She has taught at Lincoln College, Oxford, as an early modern studies faculty of the Middlebury College Bread Loaf School of English (a summer graduate program) and in South Korea as a distinguished visiting professor at Seoul National University.
In her outreach work, Professor Joubin has testified before congress in a congressional briefing on the humanities and globalization, and been interviewed by BBC 4 (TV), BBC Radio (in D.C., London and Edinburgh), The Economist, Voice of America, Foreign Policy, Index on Censorship, Hay Festival, Edinburgh Festival, and various outlets and podcasts by Oxford University Press, Folger Shakespeare Library, and other journals, news media, and publishers in the U.S., China, Japan, Korea, and Brazil.
At Middlebury College, Professor Joubin holds the John M. Kirk, Jr. Chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at the Bread Loaf School of English.
Where is it happening?
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