GENDER IN HISTORY AND MEMORY: A CONVERSATION WITH GAIL HERSHATTER

Abstract

Interviewer’s Note:

Among Western scholars, Gail Hershatter is one of the very few who conducted extended research in China right after such fieldwork became possible when the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) ended. Dr. Hershatter spent two years at Nankai University (1979–1981), collecting sources for her dissertation on Tianjin workers of the first half of the twentieth century. Her liuxuesheng (study abroad) life left undeletable marks in her academic career. Her solid scholarship benefited from her ability to dive into archives and to interview locals; her research projects and interests reflected her acute concern for the changes in Chinese society. Dr. Hershatter also exemplifies the new generation of China scholars’ departure from traditional sinology, in their effort to incorporate theories and approaches from the social sciences.

Gail Hershatter received her PhD in history from Stanford University and has taught at University of California Santa Cruz for twenty-three years, four of them as Distinguished Professor. She is the inaugural director of the UCSC Institute for Humanities Research, and served many years as chair of the History Department. She was President of the Association for Asian Studies (2011–12).

Dr. Hershatter’s scholarship ranges from labor, modernity, to gender and women’s life in modern China. Her monographs, Dangerous Pleasures and The Memory of Gender won American Historical Association’s Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for Women’s History in 1997 and 2012 respectively. Since my research interest also lies in women and gender in Chinese history, I came to be quite familiar with Dr. Hershatter’s work and got to know her in person. Last March (2013) Dr. Hershatter was invited by Pomona College to deliver the 2013 Ena H. Thompson Lectures. Siting among a captivated audience, I came up with the idea to interview her for The Chinese Historical Review, which was graciously accepted and supported by the journal’s editors.

Keywords:

• gender
• Chinese woman
• memory
• oral history