Professor Ko’s research interest is the everyday lives of women in China –along with the domestic objects they made by hand–as a significant part of country’s cultural, economic and political development. She works at the intersections of anthropology, history, and women’s studies.
Ko’s recent book, Cinderella Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, published in 2005, shattered the popular conception of footbinding as a tool to oppress women and demonstrated that it was instead a source of female identity, purpose, pride, and power. It won the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association, Recently, she has been turning her attention to the skills of women’s artisans such as embroiderers, stone carvers, and ceramic artists. Her research during spring semester, 2004, as a senior fellow at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center’s Institute for International Research in Nanjing, focused on the importance of ancient art of silk-weaving for a study of the dress-making tradition and domestic work culture in China’s silk industry region. More recently, as a fellow at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, England, in spring 2007, she researched ancient swordsmith legends for insights into the relations between bodily investments and transformation of matter.
In addition to Cinderella’s Sisters, Ko has written numerous books and publications, including “Between the Boudoir and the Global Market: Shen Shou, Embroidery and Modernity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Looking Modern (forthcoming), Every Step a Lotus (2001), and Teachers of the Inner Chambers (1994). She is also co-editor of Women and Confucian Cultures in Pre-modern China, Korea, and Japan.
Ko’s courses include Chinese cultural history, body histories, women and culture in 17th century China, and Confucian cultures.
Ko earned undergraduate and advanced degrees at Stanford University, including the doctorate. She has received a number of fellowships and awards. She was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (2000-2001), a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2000-2001) and a fellow at the Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University (1999-2000). Before joining the Barnard faculty in 2001, Professor Ko taught at Rutgers University.
Rejecting popular image and accepted scholarship on the status of women in premodern China, this pathbreaking work argues that literate gentrywomen in seventeenth-century Jiangnan were far from oppressed or silenced. As writers, readers, editors, and teachers, these women created a rich culture and meaningful existence from within the constraints of the male-dominated Confucian system. The author reconstructs the social, emotional, and intellectual worlds of these women from the interstices between ideology, practice, and self-perception. Born out of curiosity about how premodern Chinese women lived, this book proposes a new way to conceptualize China's past. This reconception rests on the premise that by understanding how women lived, we better grasp the dynamics of gender relations and gain a more complete knowledge of the values of Chinese culture, the functioning of Chinese society, and the nature of historical change. The book examines three types of women's communities that developed in this environment: domestic, social, and public. Women from different families, age groups, and social stations were brought together by their shared love of poetry and common concerns as women. Though important at the time, most of these ties proved fragile and transitory because of women's inherently ambivalent position. The author argues that the gender system identified women both by their shared gender, or women-as-same, and by their social station, or women-as-different. This contradiction accorded women freedoms within their own limited spheres, but these spheres were fragmented and often demarcated by the class of male kin. As a result, even the most mobile and articulate of women had noinstitutional means of launching fundamental attacks on the gender system.
發表於2024-11-24
Teachers of the Inner Chambers 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
牡丹亭一節很好看。原來紅樓夢與牡丹亭有這樣一種內在聯係:情。原來情是對道德和階級的解構,是一種平等意識。(想起來西方對中世紀騎士之愛的解讀)。 知道瞭一些明清之際中上層知識女性的生活。我一直對古代女性挺好奇的:她們可以走齣傢門嗎?她們可以有經濟來源嗎?她們真...
評分總之,封建的、父權的、壓迫的“中國傳統”是一項非曆史的發明,它是三種意識形態和政治傳統罕見閤流的結果,即“五四”新文化運動、共産主義革命和西方女權主義學說。 受害的“封建”女性形象之所以根深蒂固,在某種程度上是齣自一種分析上的混淆,即錯誤地將標準的規定視為...
評分高彥頤還有一本著作,就是《纏足:“金蓮崇拜”盛極而衰的演變》,我還沒有看到。但是從閨塾師這裏可以看到一些相同的觀點。高彥頤認為五四時期的婦女史觀過於強調傳統與現代的對立以及傳統婦女形象的受害形象,忽略瞭古代女性在生活中可能扮演的主動角色,及當時女性本...
評分Explicitly challenging the May Forth narration of women as victims and slaves under the Feudal system, this work suggests a dynamic tripartite model to study women of the Ming-Qing China: theory or ideal norms, practice, and self-perception (based on Scott...
評分不知是我太挑剔,還是時世人心浮躁,我怎麼讀這本書,都覺得翻譯實在是雞肋,要是中文書,我鐵定是不看的,因是英文譯作,強打精神幾次都重新再看。 人啊人,術業有專攻,不能更敬業一點莫? 喜歡此書者,從中間隨便檢一段開始看就好。若是讀第一章,會纍死,讀第二章,會枯...
圖書標籤: 女性 Gender 海外中國研究 高彥頤 明清史 DorothyKo 海外中國研究叢書 文化
Delicate rendition, sensitive writer~
評分Delicate rendition, sensitive writer~
評分導論和開頭幾章節非常精彩,融閤瞭多方理論和研究成果。敘事和分析都不弱。偶有邏輯瑕疵,但中心論點沒有受到影響。後幾章有重復拖遝的感覺。考慮到當時的情況,是一本做齣突破性成果的好書。
評分對五四史觀的挑戰
評分不敢相信這書是兩年之內寫齣來的。。。
Teachers of the Inner Chambers 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載