Presented by Erin Schlumpf (Film Studies) 

My forthcoming book, Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma (SUNY UP 2025), pushes the boundaries of the burgeoning field of Sino-French studies, In my book, I analyze cases of what I term “feminist refusal” in literary and cinematic texts that were produced after the 1940-1944 German Occupation of France and, forty-five years later, after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in China. I argue that while canonical narratives of post-trauma art center on heroic acts of physical and political resistance, women often responded in other ways: through silence and a refusal to “move on” from the horrors of the past. Calling these forms of protest “feminist refusal” highlights the ways in which women in these films and novels were not passive witnesses to history, but actors in a drama of remembering set against the historical tides of forgetting and modernization. My talk will introduce the ideas in my book through a reading of Emily Xiaobai Tang’s 2001 film Conjugation, in which a Chinese couple tries to make sense of their lives in Beijing under martial law during the winter of 1989.

This event is part of the War and Peace Studies ‘Gender War and Peace Speaker Series' in conjunction with the CIS Thursday Forum, a weekly series focusing on international research, scholarship and creative activity for the OHIO community.