Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow
Zhuoran “Ran” Deng is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Comparative Literature. She is also affiliated with the Women & Gender Studies Institute and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. Born and raised in China and educated in the United States, Ran’s research intersects Asian/Asian American studies, political philosophy, and queer aesthetic theory.
Fellowship Project: Beyond the Biopolitics of Consent: A Transpacific Aesthetics of Reproductive Futurity
Consent has long been implemented to establish and maintain the relationship between people. However, Deng's project poses a radical question: Do we, or can we, consent to be born? In her dissertation, she investigates the politics of consent in the context of birth, abortion, contraception, sterilization, and population control policies in the transpacific context. Putting the question of life at the center of her analysis, she hopes to explore how an aesthetic critique can expose, intervene in, and reconfigure the limits of consent, and help imagine otherwise impossible ways of inhabiting the world .