'Visualizing Deafness: Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in East Asian Popular Culture'

The Global Studies Seminar presents “Visualizing Deafness: Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in East Asian Popular Culture” by the James P. Storer Assistant Professor of Asian History at Kenyon College Lin Li.

Focusing on the representation of Deaf women in contemporary East Asian popular culture, this presentation analyzes how disability is understood along the lines of gender and sexuality in East Asian contexts. Informed by the methodology of feminist disability studies, this presentation illuminates the entanglement among disability, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in a transnational context. Li’s interest in this topic arises from her observation that many works of East Asian popular culture feature beautiful Deaf women as protagonists in romances. Given the volume of works of this nature, it is no exaggeration to say that there exists a whole sub-genre of what Li calls “Deaf women romance” in contemporary East Asia. In this presentation, she will examine selected works of popular culture that are characteristic of Deaf women romance. In doing so, Li seeks to answer three questions: (1) why is the trope of beautiful Deaf women so popular and common in East Asia? (2) how are Deaf women conceived and depicted across different East Asian locales and cultures? (3) what do the different processes by which Deaf women are sexualized across East Asian cultures tell us about the study of disability in transnational contexts? 

As a gender historian of East Asia, Li is interested in the dynamic interactions among structural injustice, historical memory, and popular culture. She is currently preparing a monograph that examines the emergence and struggle over trans-Pacific historical memories of the “comfort women” system, a system of Japanese military sexual slavery during World War II.