As Cathy Caruth notes, “trauma is the confrontation with an event that, in its unexpectedness or horror, cannot be placed within the scheme of prior knowledge.” For women, trauma can be dismissed or rendered invisible by a society reluctant to acknowledge its complicity. Thus, narrating such “impossible histories” becomes a solitary yet heroic act to reclaim their experiences (Unclaimed Experiences, 1996). Judith Butler asserts that this act can liberate us from grief and the pressure of conformity. The vulnerable state shaped by social forces creates fertile ground for trauma (Undoing Gender, 2004). Building on these theories, this panel examines the intertwined themes of gendered memory and trauma in contemporary Chinese literature and cinema.
Cello analyzes Stanley Kwan’s deconstructed biopic Centre Stage as both an archive of mourning and a remediation of a film star’s traumatic suicide. Wei explores how Xiao Hong voices women’s physical suffering and emotional resilience, portraying what Elaine Scarry calls the “body in pain” (Body in Pain, 2008). Licandro investigates Ding Ling’s post-socialist memoir Blizzard World, revealing a complex gendered memory of political trauma. Sang highlights how Hsi Muren’s poetry reflects personal and intergenerational trauma while reclaiming her Mongolian identity amid erasure by the Chinese Han majority. Zhang’s analysis of dancer-filmmaker Wen Hui showcases women’s creative processes and the power of self- and multicultural healing from trauma.
In all studies, memory relates to “postmemory” (Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory Writing, 2012) as a form of remembrance across familial, ethnic, and romantic relationships. This contributes to broader discussions on the role of literature and cinema in pluralizing memory practices, healing through collective memories, and advocating for true gender equality.
Cecília Mello, University of São Paulo - “Remembering Ruan Lingyu: Media, Memory, and the Reconstruction of a Star in Centre Stage”
Stanley Kwan’s deconstructed biopic Centre Stage (1992) reimagines the life and myth of 1930s Shanghai film star Ruan Lingyu, whose suicide at twenty-four transformed her into a locus of collective trauma and media fascination. In her short career, Ruan made over thirty films—many now lost—embodying the tensions of modern womanhood in Republican-era China. Her death, following the moralistic press campaign surrounding the 1935 film New Women, became emblematic of the destructive entanglement of gender, celebrity, and the public gaze.
Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s notion of trauma as an unassimilable event that returns through narration, this paper explores how Centre Stage stages remembrance as both repetition and reconstruction. Kwan’s film interlaces archival fragments, documentary interviews, and fictional re-enactments to produce a layered cinematic palimpsest where memory, mourning, and mediation collapse into one another. Through this self-reflexive structure, the film revisits the historical trauma of Ruan’s persecution and reflects on the affective labor of remembrance.
In this context, Ruan’s body—her gestures and expressions—emerges as what Elaine Scarry calls a “site of certainty” (1985), testifying to the gendered embodiment of trauma that exceeds representation. Maggie Cheung’s re-performance of Ruan’s roles generates what Marianne Hirsch terms “postmemory,” where the residues of prior trauma are reactivated across generations and media forms. By analyzing how Centre Stage mediates this transgenerational transmission of female suffering, the paper argues that the film functions as both an “archive of mourning” and a meta-cinematic inquiry into how trauma and memory are gendered and remade through cinematic form.
Zhen Zhang, New York University – “Dancing, Telling, and Healing Together: Wen Hui and Her Third Grandma” Chinese dancer and documentarian Wen Hui created two interconnected films: the short "Dancing with the Third Grandma" and the feature "Listening to the Third Grandma Telling Her Story." These works explore the complex relationship between women's memories and trauma, emphasizing how personal narratives can reclaim agency. The character of the Third Grandma represents the collective struggles and resilience of women in a patriarchal society. My paper highlights memory as both a repository of trauma and a vehicle for healing. Storytelling becomes a cathartic process, allowing women to express their often-silenced pain and experiences. The Third Grandma's tales, filled with sorrow and survival, provide a lens for the audience to understand the complexities of women's lived experiences. The storytelling space becomes a site of resistance, where remembering transforms trauma into a shared legacy. Wen's work illustrates that while memory is intertwined with suffering, it also holds the potential for empowerment and solidarity among women. I aim to emphasize the importance of honoring women's memories as crucial for cultural preservation and social change. "Listening to the Third Grandma" not only testifies to individual resilience but also highlights the collective strength found in shared narratives, reaffirming the power of women's stories in confronting personal and historical traumas. In the short film, Wen invites the Third Grandma to dance alongside her while sitting in the old woman’s courtyard. As they move, they engage in a dialogue asking, “Do you see me?” with the assertive response, “Yes, I see you.” This interaction captures the fragmented nature of memory, reflecting how trauma disrupts personal and collective histories.
Tze-lan Sang, Michigan State University - “Memory and Identity in Hsi Muren’s Posttraumatic Poetry”
Hsi Muren (b. 1943), a painter and writer of Mongolian descent based in Taiwan, is a widely read poet in the Sinophone world. In the 1980s, her early poetry collections were immediate hits upon publication in Taiwan, and soon gained a phenomenal following in mainland China. Some critics in Taiwan who favored avant-garde works denigrated her works as vacuous popular lyrical poetry. In this paper, I point out that Hsi’s poetic oeuvre—developed over a long career—gains new significance when reassessed from the perspective of posttraumatic memory writing with decolonial valence. Many of Hsi’s poems in the 21st century focus on her repeated journeys to Inner Mongolia (since 1989), which led to a bittersweet reclaiming of her cultural roots while being confronted with the destruction that Han settler colonialism has brought upon the traditional Mongolian way of life. Faced with personal and intergenerational traumas, and with identity crises on both individual and collective levels, Hsi reconstructs real and imagined memories to combat the threats of erasure, assimilation, and amnesia. Memory writing, then, is a crucial strategy for shoring up a precarious identity. What’s more, some of Hsi’s reconstructions venture into the territory of “postmemory” (Hirsch 2012), when she writes about her parents’ accounts of loss. A member of the Mongolian diaspora due to her family’s history of relocations and exile, Hsi acquired native fluency in Mandarin through her schooling in Nanjing, Hong Kong, and Taipei and ironically must write in the Han Chinese colonizer’s language to tell or retell the stories of her parents and ancestors. Her Sinophone poetry is thus symptomatic of a multilayered, shifting, wandering, and ambivalent transcultural identity.
Daniela Licandro, Tallinn University - "Remembering The Great Northern Wilderness: Gender and Generation in Ding Ling’s Blizzard World"
Labeled a “rightist” in 1957, Ding Ling requested in 1958 to be relocated to the Great Northern Wilderness (Beidahuang), in Heilongjiang province, where her partner Chen Ming had been forcibly sent to do “labor under supervision” (jiandu laodong). The Great Northern Wilderness was one of the key destinations for criminals and political opponents under the Communist regime. Ding Ling later chronicled her experiences in this region in a memoir titled Blizzard World (Feng xue renjian, 1987). Her portrayal of the Great Northern Wilderness as a site of renewed hopes and possibilities has offered valuable material for historical reassessments of experiences of exile (or self-imposed exile) under the Maoist era (Wang 2017), but the memoir’s gendered and generational approach to the revolutionary past and to traumatic individual and collective experiences has remained largely unexplored. In Blizzard World, “generation” primarily conveys Ding Ling’s awareness of her own historical and class position in contrast to the generation of revolutionaries hailing from rural backgrounds. This horizontal understanding of generation intersects with a vertical, genealogical dimension that emphasizes family lineage and the impact of her political trajectory on her children. This dual configuration is closely tied to her gendered position as both mother and wife. Drawing on recent scholarship on gender and generational perspectives on post-communist memory (Artwińska and Mrozik 2020), this paper examines how these themes shape Ding Ling’s narrative. By offering a new reading of a largely understudied text, it proposes a fresh methodological approach to the study of Mao-era legacies through the intersecting lens of gender and generational experience.
Xiao Hong and Women Writers War-time Memories S. Louisa Wei Shortly after Japan occupied Manchuria, a wave of progressive young writers fled to Shanghai and other locales. Among the so-called “North-eastern Writers,” Xiao Hong emerged as the most gifted, surpassing her flamboyant lover, Xiao Jun. The couple co-authored their first book of autobiographical essays. As they faced Japanese scrutiny, they relocated to Shanghai in 1934, where they befriended Lu Xun, a leading figure in the New Literary Movement, who assisted them in publishing their first novels. Hong’s “Mr. Lu Xun” is a notable example of memoir writing amidst numerous remembrance articles following Lu Xun’s death in 1936. Tragically, Hong passed away at the age of 30 in early 1942 in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong, prompting a wave of collective memory among fellow writers who had also fled southward. This paper compares my two documentaries, Writing 10,000 Miles (2019) and A Life in Six Chapters (2022), with Ann Hui’s feature drama The Golden Era (2014). All three films feature Xiao Hong and Xiao Jun, incorporating the voices of many fellow writers. Hui’s film is distinctive in that it blends documentary-like sequences with scripted performances, focusing on Hong’s romances with three male writers, particularly her tumultuous relationship with Jun. In contrast, my 2019 documentary emphasizes how female writers remember Hong, presenting richer and more nuanced recollections that capture intimate scenes from her daily life and reveal her emotional landscape. By comparing Hui’s film, my documentaries, and various memoirs, I aim to explore the remarkable gendered tapestry of memories about Hong and their implications.
20260730T154520260730T1715America/Argentina/Buenos_AiresGendered Memory and Trauma in Chinese Literature and CinemaSV304MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
