Aminda Smith

Sexual violence echoes through scholarly and popular histories of socialist China: from the state's publicized efforts to crack down on rapists, to accusations against cadres who demanded sexual favors; from the sent-down youth who were raped in the countryside, to the many sexual abuse charges leveled at so-called enemies. Workshop participants have collected case files related to rape and sexual violence in the PRC, and we propose an interdisciplinary workshop to read a selection of these documents and think seriously about the challenges we face when we try to do a text-based history of rape. The literature on sexual violence in the PRC suggests that we have not yet fully mapped the political, socio-cultural, and discursive realms within which these accusations were recorded.