Remedial Kids: playful academic lectures for the culturally curious

Say Yes To The Dress: Bridal Fashion & Muslim Identity in China

Remedial Kids is a social community for the culturally curious. We host playful academic lectures at cosy bars across Singapore.

Note: Ticket includes 1 happy hour beer/wine or 2 sodas

Session #7

This lecture explores how Hui Muslims in northwestern China use wedding fashion to express their ethnic and religious identities, especially in relation to gender. Drawing on ethnographic accounts to examine the process of taking pre-wedding portraiture, this lecture demonstrates how the spaces within bridal salons and the makeover process influence Hui Muslim brides’ understanding of what it means to be Hui.

About the speaker: Yang Yang is a lecturer in the Department of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore. She received her PhD in Human Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research focuses on transnational networks based on Islam and Muslim communities between China and Southeast Asia, feminist geopolitics, heritage diplomacy, and urban studies. Her research also looks into the gendered geographies of Muslim identities in northwestern China, especially the expression of Muslim womanhood through fashion in the Hui community.