Abstract: The talk moves religion and gender to center stage in the Chinese revolution, examining the mobilizational dynamics of anti-superstition campaign in the years of 1942-53. Xiaofei Kang argues that religion was not merely adversary for the revolutionaries-it also served as a model for the ways in which mass mobilization and political legitimacy were achieved. In this parallel and often paradoxical process, Kang demonstrates that the recasting the cosmic forces of yin and yang that sustained the traditional gender hierarchy and ritual order had been reappropriated for mass mobilization. Moreover, revolutionary art and literature revamped old narratives of female ghosts and ritual exorcism to inject the people with a new masculinist vision endowed with both scientific potency and the heavenly mandate. Gendered language and symbolism in Chinese religion thus remained central to inspiring pathos, ethos, and logos for the revolution.

Speaker’s bio: Dr. Xiaofei Kang is Professor of History and Religion at George Washington University, USA.She holds a Ph.D. in Chinese history from Columbia University. She teaches courses on religions in East Asia, and her research focuses on gender, ethnicity, and Chinese religions in traditional and modern China. She is the author of The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2006). She co-authored (with Donald S. Sutton) Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Ethnicity, Religion and the State in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland (Brill, 2016), and co-edited (with Jia Jinhua and Ping Yao) Gendering Chinese Religion: Subject, Identity and Body (SUNY Press, 2014). Her recent book, Enchanted Revolution: Ghosts, Shamans, and Gender Politics in Chinese Communist Propaganda (Oxford, 2023) examines the intertwined discourses of religion, gender and the Chinese Communist revolution.