Waste, Gender, and Subalternity in Contemporary Chinese Literary and Visual Culture

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My project will examine literary and visual representations of waste in contemporary China. Drawing on a range of primary sources including literature, film, photography, and street art and on Zygmunt Bauman's notion of "wasted lives," I will explore how representations of waste relate to representations of a broad experience of subalternity in postsocialist China. In examining representations of wasted lives, I will pay special attention to gender. Critical studies of waste have increasingly informed literary and cultural analysis, but this scholarship remains scant when it comes to China. My study aims to address this gap.