In this talk, Maram Epstein will focus on the contradictions between the Qing law code which did not recognize a married woman's filial obligations to her own parents and fiction and exemplary biographies which increasingly recognized and valued the filial ties between women and their natal parents. Her work involves materials from a larger project on the changing discursive constructions of filial piety in 18th-century China.
Maram Epstein specializes in Ming and Qing fiction, with an emphasis on gender. She is the author of Competing Discourses: Orthodoxy, Authenticity, and Engendered Meanings in Late-Imperial Chinese Fiction (2001). She is now pursuing several linked projects concerning ritual, expression of emotions, the body, and representation of self. She spent eight months in the Number One Historical Archives in Beijing collecting legal records of domestic violence also looking at the various representations of filial piety in legal records, fiction , and autobiographical writings. As in her earlier work, her goal is to uncover how the self is represented in different discourses and to tease out the implications of various narrative clichés that continue to shape the cultural imaginary of contemporary China