When “diversity” has become a keyword in funding applications, personnel policies, and creative initiatives, this course highlights “gender” as an essential tool to unpack thinking and practices on writing. It introduces latest understandings on gender – theories, issues, politics – and mobilizes them to examine a wide range of texts, from state propaganda to protest slogans, from literary classics to Chinese pop lyrics, ultimately to address the question: Who writes, and who is being written? Drawing theories and Chinese/ local popular practices together, the course aims to transforms students’ pen with gender sensitivity, and their writing into possibilities of persuasion, empowerment, and intervention.

This course aims to enable postgraduate students: (1) to acquire updated understandings on gender studies, particularly in connection with writing; (2) to examine writings from gender perspectives; (3) to explore the connections between writing and desire, bodies and sexualities; and (4) to incorporate understandings on gender in their own writing practices.