About the Lecture
In this talk, historian Tani Barlow introduces her recent book, In The Event of Women (Duke University Press, 2021). A history of what Barlow calls an event, the book shows how advertisers, philosophers, Marxists, psychologists and ephemeral advertising media acted to install a new truth, that sexual reproduction clarifies that women different from yet equal to men in the origin of the species and social evolution.
About the Speaker
Tani Barlow is a historian of thought, feminist philosophy and social theory at Rice University. In this study she focuses on how advertising ephemera consolidated abstract philosophy in the Chinese urban social environment during the first half of the twentieth century, under conditions of colonial modernity, commodification and commercial capitalism. She is working on a new project under the title, The Material Life of Society, a study of philosophy and theory of society in late 19th and 20th century Chinese thought.
Originally published at asia.nd.edu.