Grounded on the works of theorists such as Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag, I intend to investigate in which ways the Chinese author Ma Yuan narrates the diseased bodies of marginal groups and their specific metaphors in the novella Fabrication. Moreover, I will explore why Ma Yuan chose to represent the existential crisis and personal identity of Maqu villagers in Tibet and the link between this narrative and particular cultural fields in post-Mao China. Initially, I will analyze the narrative strategies adopted in Fabrication and consider the narrative of this story as a form of orientalizing gaze. Then, I will focus on both the physical body and social body of Maqu lepers from aspects of social interaction and private space within the framework of body politics. Furthermore, I will explore the bodily experience of the characters to denote the seeking for identity (both historical and individual) within the collective historical trauma and dominant social ideology. Finally, I will connect the novella with the cultural background of China in the 1980s to explore what embodied experiences of Chinese people in the post-Mao era are expressed.

Authors:
Yi He, University of New South Wales, Australia

About the Presenter(s)
Ms Yi He is a Doctoral Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of New South Wales. Her current interest lies in the body narratives in Chinese avant-garde fiction from the 1980s- 1990s.

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