Cara Healey’s presentation “Ornamentalism and the Male Gaze in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction” delves into gender depictions in contemporary Chinese science fiction by women authors through the lens of ornamentalism, which Anne Anlin Cheng has theorized as an “aesthetic ontology” by which Asian femininity is tied to “ornamental artifice.” She argues that works by Hao Jingfang, Xia Jia, Chu Xidao, and Chen Xian combine, subvert, and reinterpret tropes of premodern Chinese literary genres like zhiguai (tales of the strange) and caizi jiaren (scholar-beauty romances) to critique gendered and racialized expectations placed upon Chinese women by ornamentalist discourse. Thus, she shows how such strategic mobilizations of generic tropes challenge popular conceptions of science fiction as a male-dominated genre, expanding definitions of science fiction both within China and globally.

In his presentation “Repressed Modernities of Sinophone SF Cinema: Transnational Co-productions of Kamen Rider in Hong Kong and Taiwan,” Nathaniel Isaacson situates some Hong Kong films in their transnational and generic positions in the Sinophone world as exceptions to the perceived absence of Sinophone sf cinema prior to the 21st century. Hong Kong films like Iron Super Man (1975), Guangong Battles the Aliens (1976), and The Super Inframan (1975), and Taiwan’s The Super Riders (1975-6), and Hokkien-dialect Dragon Superman trilogy (1968) attempted to capitalize on Japanese cinematography, directing, and costume talent by incorporating elements of the monster/robot action franchises like Kamen Rider and Ultraman, and elements of kung fu cinema. Isaacson compares the success of the Japanese “media mix” of franchised consumer products based on the copyrighted characters to the apparent failure of the stand-alone films in Chinese media markets.

In her presentation “Memory, Dream, and Science Fictionality in Chen Chuncheng’s Short Stories,” Hua Li focuses ­on science fictionality in Chen Chuncheng’s A Submarine at Night and Other Stories (2020) and “Snow Mountain Bodhisattva” (2021). Li argues that Chen’s extensive utilization of fantasy and science fictional motifs reveal the “science fictionality” that Mingwei Song has observed in much modern and contemporary Chinese literature, and illustrates the concept of “mythorealism” proposed by Yan Lianke. Following up on David Wang’s observation of the dialectical relationship between cang (to hide) and chuan ( to pass on) in Chen’s various stories, Li explores how Chen uses cang as a narrative strategy to construct a fantastic and science fictional space to explore literary and socio-philosophical issues, thereby uncovering truths of an internal nature.

Mingwei Song’s presentation “Can We Read Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Trilogy as a Nonbinary Text? '' experiments with a speculative reconsideration of the questions of genre and gender in SF, with a view toward recognizing a nonbinary vision of the Neo-Baroque that has emerged in Chinese SF and its variations in experimental fiction in the larger Sinophone literary context. Through a new nonbinary reading of Liu Cixin’s novels, he suggests a nonbinary method to extract SF from the conventional categories that are based on a series of dichotomies in literary theories and histories. Song also introduces the newest generation of women and nonbinary authors. Their visions of the “Möbius” time-space without beginning or end and their identifications with “chimera” as the monstrous self-other combination create new breakthroughs for the arrival of a new literary universe that shines with a Neo-Baroque splendor, which illuminates infinite folds in the always alternative world building that may never settle in a singular form of representation with certainty.

Panelists will be limited to twelve minutes of speaking time in order to allow for discussion following panel presentations.