Conference: Making Gender in Opera: East Meets West

Friday 12 - Saturday 13 December 2025
Faculty of Music, Schwarzman Centre for Humanities, Oxford

Book here!

Tickets £30 for general admission (£20 for student admission)

This international conference explores gender, performance, and theatricality through a comparative lens on opera and theatre traditions across the world. Bringing together scholars and practitioners, this conference examines how gender is constructed, embodied, and represented on the operatic stage, from early European opera to contemporary Asian theatre forms.

Hosted at the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford, the two-day event features research papers and roundtable discussions engaging with themes of performance, identity, and cross-cultural exchange. Topics include cross-gender performance, voice and embodiment, opera anthropology, global theatrical aesthetics, and the politics of representation. It aims to foster dialogue between musicology, ethnomusicology, gender studies, and theatre research, offering an inclusive platform for interdisciplinary exchange.

Open to scholars, students, artists, and the general public, "Making Gender in Opera: East Meets West" invites audiences to experience opera as a global and evolving art form that bridges cultural traditions and redefines understandings of gender and performance.

 

Download the full programme

 

Programme

Friday 12 December

10.00-11.00 Session 1
  • Haili Ma (University of Leeds), ‘The ‘Perfect’ Gender Making through Tao: the case of Chinese All-female Yue Opera’ 
  • Bette Zhaoyi Yan (University of Oxford), ‘The Magic of In-Between: Cross-Gender Performance and Gendered Selfhood in Chinese Opera on the Contemporary Stage’ 
11.00-11.30 Tea break  
11.30-13.00 Session 2
  • Getong Feng (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), ‘Reinterpretations of Turandot in Contemporary German-Speaking Director’s Opera: A Case Study of Productions by Philipp Stölzl, Claus Guth and Marie-Eve Signeyrole’ 
  • Jiadong Zhang (University College, London), ‘Neither Adaptation Nor Re-staging: A Re-examination of S. I. Hsiung’s Translation and Direction of Lady Precious Stream’ 
  • Mridula Sharma (University of Manchester), ‘Reimagining Gender Through Class Precarity: La Bohème on the 2025 British Stage’ 
13.00-14.00 Lunch  
14.00-15.00 Session 3
  • Suzanne Aspden (University of Oxford), ‘Operatic Verisimilitude and Gender Non-Conformity in 18th-century Opera’ 
  • Rasa Murauskaitė (University of Cambridge), 'Representing the changing discourse on gender in Lithuanian contemporary opera: The case of the comic-strip opera Alpha' 
15.00-15.30 Tea break  
15.30-17.00 Session 4
  • Roundtable discussion: Orientalism in (Western) scholarship and gender stereotypes in (Eastern) opera, led by Bette Zhaoyi Yan and William Want (University of Oxford) 

 

Saturday 14 December

10.00-11.00 Session 5
  • Ashley Thorpe (Royal Holloway University of London) ‘ “Deeds Not Words”: Gender Performance and the Possibility of Its Subversion in Japanese and English-language Nō’  
  • Jad Orphée Chami, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)) ‘Sing Like a Man! From the Haute-Contre to Oum Kalthoum: Gender, Listening, and the Politics of the Liminal Voice Across Musical Traditions’
11.00-11.30 Tea break  
11.30-12.30 Session 6
  • Performance: Jin Zhao (visiting performance artist)
  • Roundtable on performance: Josette Bushell-Mingo (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama), Bette Zhaoyi Yan, William Want 

 

Call for Volunteers

We are looking for volunteers to support this international conference: helping to welcome speakers and guests into the building, directing them to the Faculty spaces, and using your card to assist them through secure doors. In return, you will have the rare opportunity to meet and speak with leading scholars and artists in this field coming from institutions such as the University of Cambridge, University of Hamburg, LMU Munich, UQAM Montréal, Royal Holloway, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University College London, Leeds, Manchester, and others. When the sessions are running smoothly and things are quiet, you will be able to engage with the speakers, hear their ideas, and immerse yourself in rich conversations about gender, performance, and opera across East and West. If you are interested in joining us, please email zhaoyi.yan@regents.ox.ac.uk. Thanks!