Event — Workshop

Re-staging the Periphery as the Center: Women Communities in East Asian Religions

This two-day international workshop is organised by Leiden Center for Intercultural Philosophy (LUCIP) and funded by Leiden University Fund, the Institute for Philosophy Leiden University, The International Institute for Asian Studies, and the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

The international workshop “Re-staging the Periphery as the Center: Women Communities in East Asian Religions” aims to explore previously overlooked resources to rethink gender relationships, women’s agency, and community building in East Asian religions, broadly construed. It thus has a twofold aim. Critically, the workshop problematizes the standard narrative in terms of the inner-outer distinction that secludes women in the inner quarters and positions women on the margin of their communities. Constructively, participants in this workshop rediscover previously marginalized voices to explore how women have creatively mobilized resources to map out a communal space, whether real or imagined, as a lived reality for their religious practices. Restaging the periphery as the center, the workshop focuses on three major themes — spatializing feminisms, female pioneers, and gendered discourses — to explore women’s power on the margin and their contribution to the diversity of the socio-cultural landscape throughout East Asian history. Bringing together philosophers, intellectual historians, material culture specialists, anthropologists, and sociologists into a conversation, the workshop intends to recuperate untold stories of women’s lived experiences and reimagine feminist theories in the East Asian cultural sphere.

Details of the workshop can be found on the workshop website:

https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2023/06/lucip-international-workshop-women-communities-in-east-asian-religions