院系成員

Much ink has been spilled on anxieties over what is called knowledge or information overload and the new technologies fuelling evermore such overload. Even studies on how to manage an overwhelming sense of having “too much to know” have reached an overwhelming number. This project does not offer yet another study of the social and cultural histories of knowledge in China to suggest that anxieties are not new. Nor does it aim to address in an all-encompassing way debates over models old and new of managing knowledge production and its inherent power structure. It calls attention, rather, to boundaries created by rivalry and subsequently naturalized by the power structures of knowledge and gender during a period in China when boundaries of knowledge, of all kinds, had to be redrawn. Rivalry and, worse, bullying and abuse driven by rivalry, are not concerns peculiar to sociologists. The latest ethnographic studies in China have delineated patterns of social behaviour and interaction underlying a worsening “ecology of academia,” which are nurturing and encouraging rivalry among institutions of knowledge and the individuals and groups trying to navigate academic life in these institutions. A gendered history of rivalry in early modern and modern China foregrounds gender as a social factor reshaping the boundaries of knowledge and triggering rivalry among the new actors and producers of knowledge. This project does not lead to any glib oversimplification of a gendered history of rivalry as the conflict between men and women. On the contrary, in calling for a more sophisticated study of gender as a key to understanding rivalry in knowledge production, it highlights how the re-conceptualization of gender created new biases, hierarchies, and exclusionary mechanisms even within the same gender and, in the worst cases, fractured “women” as a social category and an ideal for feminist solidarity.