The 3rd Biennial Conference
Engendering the Sinophone: Rethinking Gender, Sexuality, and Asian Settler Colonialism across the Sinophone World
May 9—10,2025
University of Alberta
Call for Papers
The last two 3S conferences have evoked “multisensory protests,” “ocean and empires” in order to propose alternative geographical and temporal imaginaries to expand the analytical scope of Sinophone studies.
Taking Shu-mei Shih’s call for a multidirectional critique of Sinophone studies as a source of inspiration, the third 3S conference allows us the opportunity to extend the scope of Sinophone Studies in another direction. In order to consider how gender, sexuality, queerness, and trans identity and embodiment engender new directions for Sinophone studies. The choice of theme is particularly timely because of the recent emergence of queer Sinophone studies as a major subfield. The field’s popularity demonstrates how both the Sinophone and queerness work together to call into question the essentialist assumptions of Chineseness, ethnic nationalism, and heterosexuality and how these assumptions overlap. Feminist and queer indigenous writers, filmmakers, and artists expose how even analytical categories of diaspora, exile, and “postcolonialism” ignore the ongoing violence and erasure of settler colonialism. In other words, a queer Sinophone decolonial approach can expose how Chineseness, Taiwaneseness, and Hong Kongness overlap with heteronormativity, queer liberalism, creolization, and coloniality.
“Engendering the Sinophone” is a call to imagine how far the Sinophone as a concept can go when questions of gender, sexuality, feminism, and queerness are brought to bear on racial formation and indigeneity. Engaging with recent developments in Transpacific studies and decolonial theory, one might ask: how does feminist theory and queer studies redirect the conceptual contour of Sinophone studies? How do feminist, queer, and trans writers, filmmakers, and visual artists deconstruct and unsettle categories of nationalism and Chineseness? In turn, how might the multidirectional critique of Sinophone studies provincialize the assumed whiteness and Eurocentrism of feminist theory, queer studies, and trans studies? How does the question of Asian migrants as uninvited guests, or what Jodi Byrd terms “arrivants” push the field of Sinophone studies in new directions? We are interested in papers that explore these themes, including—but not limited to—the questions:
While queer Sinophone studies points to the deconstructive potential of both the queer and the Sinophone, what other conceptual convergence and overlapping might bring the two fields together or pull them apart? How might the legalization of gay marriage in Taiwan in 2019 and recent LGBTQ legal progresses in Hong Kong be understood within a broader genealogy of feminist and queer social movements and struggles?
How does the field of Asian Settler Colonialism complicate and extend the reach of the Sinophone?
How might feminist and queer classic works by writers and filmmakers such as Xiao Hong, Dung Kai-cheung, Chen Xue, Chi Ta-wei, Tsai Ming-liang, and Zero Chou be retheorized through queer Sinophone theory? What analytical potential can queer Sinophone studies engender beyond conventional feminist and queer approaches alone?
How might queer Native studies, queer indigeneity, and decolonial studies further unsettle the Han-centrism evident in most mainstream gay, lesbian, and trans historiography and narratives produced by historians, writers, and filmmakers? In short, how might indigenous and decolonial studies queer queer Sinophone studies?
Submit your proposal via this google form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdZQ_GFNsHxmdXGPRQmhBan9H79aeMYKtTEseSUspp9goTMPQ/viewform) by October 21, 2024. For further questions contact
the Society for Sinophone Studies at admin@sinophonestudies.org
Dates: May 9-10, 2025 at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
Day 1 (May 9, Friday)
Registration, Breakfast, Coffee and Tea: 9:30-9:45am
Opening Remarks (Clara Iwasaki): 9:45-9:55am
10:00-11:15am
Keynote Address, “Queer Homecoming as Tactics of Intervention,” by E.K. Tan (introduced by Clara Iwasaki)
11:30-1:00pm
Panel 1: Queering Transnational Migrants and Movements
Panel Chair: Alvin K. Wong
Ting Guo (Assistant Professor, CUHK)
“Minor Transnationalism from Below: Queering the Left on the Margins”
Hui-zhong Guo (PHD student NTU)
“Queer Writing Across the Straits: Taiwanese Queers in Hong Kong Literature and Films, and Hong Kong Queers in Taiwanese Literature – A Case Study of Hsu En-en's The Becoming (2024) and Fagara (2019)”
Elliot YN Cheung (GDip Queens University)
“Sovereignty or Homonationalism? A Comparative Legal Analysis of Queer Refugees in Taiwan and Canada”
Ting Fai Yu (Associate Researcher, French Centre for Research on Contemporary China)
“Pride in Transition: LGBTQ+ Activism in Post-2019 Hong Kong”
1:00-2:30pm
Catered lunch (3-30 ASH)
2:30-3:30pm
Panel 2: Gender and Culture Production in the Cold War Transpacific
Panel Chair: Clara Iwasaki
Yiwen Liu (Postdoc SFU)
“Racial Violence in the Absence of Whiteness: A Queer Reading of Cold War Hong Kong and Zhong Xiaoyang’s “Tender Feelings” (1983)”
Wenxuan Xue (PhD Candidate, Tufts)
“Sensing Minor Sinophone in Wu Tsang’s DUILIAN”
3:30-3:45pm
Coffee and Tea Break
3:45-5:00pm
Panel 3: Transpacific Settler Colonialism
Panel Chair: E.K. Tan
Yu-ting Huang (Assistant Professor, Wesleyan University)
“Gender, Empires, and Settler Articulations in Late Cold War Taiwan”
Quinton Huang (MA Student, UBC)
“Sedimented Settlement: Land Regimes, Settler Colonial Common Sense, and Squatters in Postwar Hong Kong”
Cheng Chi (MA student, UBC)
“Rethinking Asian Settler Colonialism: Chinese Male Laborers and Indigenous Women through a Postcolonial Feminist Lens”
Dinner: Tasty House
Day 2 (May 10, Saturday)
9:30-9:45am
Breakfast, Coffee and Tea
10:00-11:15am
Keynote Address, “Queering Sinophone Studies: Towards a Theory of Unruly Comparison,” by Alvin K. Wong (introduced by E.K. Tan)
11:30am-12:45pm
Panel 1: Towards a New Sinophone Future
Panel Chair: Hyuk-chan Kwon
Mason Wong (PhD Student NYU)
“Historicizing Control: Towards a Cultural Poetics of the Non-normative Sinophone Subject”
Martina Codeluppi (Associate Professor, U Bologna)
“Gender and Climate Crisis in the Sinophone Context: The Case of Biospheres by Chi Ta-wei”
Seoyeon Lee (PhD candidate, USC)
“Archiving New Taiwan: Postcolonial Embodiment of Queer Cyborgs in Taiwanese Climate Fiction”
12:45-2:00pm
Catered lunch (3-30 ASH)
2:00-3:30pm
Panel 2: Exploring Gender on the Silver Screen: Sinophone Cinemas
Panel Chair: Rebecca Ehrenwirth
Helena Wu (CRC UBC)
“Queering the Rivers and Lakes: Re-reading the Jianghu Imagery in Hong Kong Cinema”
Lillian Ngan (PhD Candidate, USC)
“Navigating Subversion: Vietnamese Migrant Workers and Feminist Perspectives in Taiwanese Documentaries”
Yayu Zheng (Asymmetry Postdoctoral Fellow, the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London)
“Navigating Commercial Realms: Interweaving Taiwan’s Identity with Queer and Mortality”
4:00-4:30pm: Roundtable and concluding remarks (all presenters)
6:30: Dinner at Khazana