This course serves two purposes. First, it serves as a Chinese language course between the advanced group stage and the independent research stage, focusing on improving the students' reading and listening comprehension proficiency. Second, it allows a comparative and theoretically informed investigation of the issue of gender and sexuality in Chinese culture from the perspective of cultural studies.

As a Chinese language course, it seeks not only to improve the students' abilities to understand written and oral Chinese but also to deepen their understanding of the Chinese tradition. Crossing the boundaries of traditional and modern, this course begins with a critical survey of the Confucian and Daoist discourses on gender roles and sexuality, followed by dialogical readings of the pre-modern Chinese romantic texts and modern Chinese literary and cinematic texts.

This course will also aim to enable the students to explore the interpretive possibilities of working within a gender framework in the research of a non-western culture. It will introduce students to basic social theories on gender and sexuality, such as the feminist way of reading texts, Michel Foucault's theory on the history of sexuality, the constructionist and discursive interpretation of gender, male gaze and film studies, inter alia, with a special emphasis on the institutional and discursive regulation of gender and sexuality in modern China. It will also help cultivate a consciousness of cultural difference among the students.