ABSTRACT
Ai Xiaoming is a feminist academic and human rights activist. She is Professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, and initiator and head of the Sex/Gender Education Forum at the Sun Yat-sen (Zhongshan) University in Guangdong Province. Professor Ai is an avid supporter of struggles to claim the rights of the oppressed, discriminated and marginalized. She is an outspoken critic of injustice, and she uses documentary films as a central medium in her work. The first film she was involved in was the documentary ‘The Vagina Monologues: Stories from China’ about the staging of the play ‘The Vagina Monologues’ at her university. She arranged for the translation of the play into Chinese together with the Stop Domestic Violence Network, an NGO, and she brought together students and fellow teachers to set up the performance. The documentary film showed how the performance was used to start discussions with audiences to critically reflect on dominant gender roles and relations. The majority of Professor Ai’s films document the lives of ordinary people in China. They include topics such as the struggles of villagers fighting against a corrupt village director, the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS, and the efforts of a mother insisting on an investigation of what the police had defined as her daughter’s natural death. Professor Ai also leads a film-making programme for NGOs. This interview took place as an email exchange in July-August 2007 (For previous interviews with Ai Xiaoming in English, see Thornham 2008 and Wang 2005).
