The Science, Technology and Medicine Seminar (STMS) series, hosted by the Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit, promotes cutting edge cross-disciplinary research that straddles the arts, sciences, and medicine. The aim is to provide a friendly forum to debate and test new ideas, papers, chapters, book projects and grant proposals, as well as topical issues and individual research.
If you are interested in joining the seminars, please let us know.
We welcome suggestions for future presentations and discussion topics.
For further information about STMS activities,
please contact Dr. Ria Sinha at riasinha@hku.hk or on 3917 9073.
Upcoming seminar:
9 December 2024 (Monday) | 3:00 pm | Room CPD-G.02 (Centennial Campus, HKU)
Title: The Modern Woman and the Household: Hygiene, Urban Education, and the YWCA in Hong Kong, 1921-1941
Abstract:
This paper examines the cultural figure of the Modern Chinese Woman as it was produced by the colonial educational scene and the women’s club of the Hong Kong Young Women’s Christian Association (HKYWCA) in interwar Hong Kong. In the broader context where the sanitary reform in the colony rested on changing the daily hygiene habits and everyday routines in the middle- and working- class Chinese households, equipping Chinese women with the knowledge of domestic and personal hygiene became a matter of state and public concern. Modern femininity as it was imagined by the colonial state and women’s clubs in this period bore the weight of transforming the health of the colony through transforming women’s relationship with modern hygiene and health practices. It was indeed through the Chinese schoolgirls, factory girls, mothers, housewives, and domestic servants that the hygiene practices in middle- and working-class households became spatialised, routinised, and quantified. The figure of the Modern Chinese Woman, this paper shows, proliferated in interwar Hong Kong in the context of modernising the domestic and urban space by Western-trained medical experts. This in turn captured the specific sites and spaces where modern practices of health and hygiene took shape, and the modern femininity that drove and emerged through them.
Keywords:
Hygiene, household, gender, colonial Hong Kong, YWCA
Bio:
Dr Stella Meng Wang is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Education University of Hong Kong. Her research uses transnational perspectives and approaches to examine the history of gender and education and history of women, health, and medicine, with a specific focus on Hong Kong. It addresses the critical intersection of transnational cultural movements and the history of women’s education, health, and medicine, with a broader contribution to the field of historical and contemporary inquiry into Chinese migration and diaspora studies.