Epistemic Justice and Women-Centered Television Drama in China: Critical Interventions of The Imperfect Victim (2023)

2026-04-24 - 2026-04-24

Bai Ruoyun, Department of Arts, Culture and Media, University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC)

Online

Date & Time: 2026/4/24, 10:00 – 12:00 AM（GMT+8, Taiwan Time）

Moderator: Chih-ming Wang, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Language: bilingual (main talk in English, discussion in English and Chinese) 

Meeting Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2601783670?pwd=OXltMkpGck02WUhPV0s1MTlXdk5wUT09&omn=82610210352

Meeting ID: 260 178 3670

password: asia

 

Abstract: 

Focusing on The Imperfect Victim (《不完美受害人》), a television drama and in-house production of China’s largest streaming platform, iQiyi, this paper deploys the feminist concept of epistemic justice and explores how epistemic justice is invoked in the television drama to foreground experiences and subjectivities of victims of sexual violence. Because the television drama borrows the frame of a legal drama, revolving around a lawyer, police, and legal cases, it inevitably centres a productive tension between epistemic justice and legal justice. The paper finds that women-produced long-form television drama provides an expansive storytelling space for the issue of sexual violence to be treated in a complex, nuanced, and sensitive manner. It argues that by instilling feminist energy into a critical tradition of Chinese television drama, the drama serves as a crucial discursive site where fruitful dialogues between epistemic and legal justice can be carried out, at a time where these dialogues are effectively shut out from social media platforms.

 

About the Speaker: 

Bai Ruoyun, Department of Arts, Culture and Media, University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC)

Bai Ruoyun’s teaching and research revolve around media as institutional, textual, and cultural practices and as technologies of mediation. Her current research projects focus on television drama and media scandal in China. 

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Organizer

National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, International Center for Cultural Studies (ICCS), 

Sub-project V: “The Chinese Contemporary: Spiritual Problems, Sentimental Education, and Historical Narratives”