Biography
Chaoran Ma is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Toronto. Her doctoral training spans three subfields: late imperial and modern Chinese history, modern European history, and the history of gender and sexuality. Her research focuses on China and East Asia since 1300, with particular interests in law, politics, gender, and family.
Her dissertation, tentatively titled Legible Desires: Law and the Politics of Intimacy in China, 1800–1949, examines how intimacy became a crucial terrain of negotiation among the state, the Confucian family, and individual actors. It analyzes how the Qing and Republican states developed legal and administrative mechanisms to investigate and verify the “facts” of intimacy. At the same time, the research investigates how state intervention reconfigured the everyday politics of family and interpersonal relations. By tracing these uses and abuses of law and morality, the dissertation reveals how the family became a contested field of power as the state sought to render what lay behind closed doors legible and governable.