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Supervisory team: Dr Sadie Wearing, Dr Rohit Dasgupta and Dr Asiya Islam.
Thesis title: Staying with Negativity: Rethinking Agency and Non-Functionality Across Sinophone Women's Cinema
Yihan Wei began her LSE-funded PhD at the Department of Gender Studies in 2025, supported by the LSE–CSC Scholarship. Her thesis examines contemporary Sinophone women's cinema, focusing on how it represents negativity and the non-functional body, dealing with illness, ageing, survival, and exhaustion. It identifies an "agency bias” that prioritises linear progress and development in Chinese feminist film criticism and proposes a practice of staying with negativity by drawing on critical disability studies and affect theory to rethink agency, non-functionality, and cross-border embodiment.
Prior to joining LSE Gender, Yihan completed an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge and a BA in Art History and Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her broader research interests include medical humanities, feminist film theory, and cross-cultural aesthetics.