Professor Maria H.A. Jaschok (Ph.D. London/SOAS) formerly Director of the International Gender Studies Centre at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (2000-2018), is currently a Senior Research Associate of the Contemporary China Studies Programme in the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, and Supervisor and Tutor for Masters in Women’s Studies. She is holding a Visiting Professorship with King’s College, London, 2019-2021.

Maria is bringing her China research track-record into a collaborative initiative. Together with Professor Tobe Levin von Gleichen, she aims to establish a fully-fledged five-year academic program combining study, grounded theorizing and application (for uses in education and in outreach). Building on extensive scholarship and advocacy in the field of epistemic injustice and embodied gender performances, new areas of interpretation and activism are to derive from longitudinal research based on cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary approaches combined with innovative uses of multi-media technology and educational applications. The proposed program (working title: ‘Female Bodies and Patriarchal Inscriptions across Cultural Contexts and Girlhood/s; a multiple-voice, multi-media, cross-cultural research project on human rights violations, cultural traditions, female genital mutilation, body modification, self-harm and self-empowerment’) is to be based at the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, King’s College.

Within a broad spectrum of historical and cross-cultural violence against women, the female body is subjected to patriarchal inscriptions which range from fashion-driven body modifications to brutal mutilation – related practices that are situated on a continuum of acceptance and repulsion which obscures commonalities and erases distinctions. The term ‘Patriarchal Inscriptions’ thus embraces historical and contemporary cross-cultural practices of carvings into female flesh, ranging from foot-binding and corseting to scarification, female genital mutilation, body modification and self-harm. Our entry-point into a close examination of human rights violations focuses on, and contextualizes, female genital mutilation (FGM).

For further information about Maria, see:

maria.jaschok@area.ox.ac.uk

https://www.ccsp.ox.ac.uk/researchers