Engendering the Sinophone Conference, May 9 and 10

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 (PhD Candidate 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“

Lunch 1:00-2:30pm (catered lunch)

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)”
  • Yee Ting Leong, (PhD student, U Michigan) “Rape-murder of a Schoolgirl: Feminism, Yellow Culture and Anti-Colonialism in 1950s Singapore Chinese Society”

3:30-3:45 (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

Day 2 (May 10, Saturday)


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 (Membranes and Lo Yichin)
  • Martina Codeluppi (Associate Professor, U Bologna) Gender and Climate Crisis in the Sinophone Context: The Case of Biospheres by Chi Ta-wei (Biospheres)
  • Seoyeon Lee (PhD candidate, USC) Archiving New Taiwan: Postcolonial Embodiment of Queer Cyborgs in Taiwanese Climate Fiction (Membranes only)

Lunch 12:45-2:00pm (catered lunch)

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
  • Shi-siang Teo (Postdoctoral Researcher, RIHSS Taiwan) Shaping the Malaysian Sinophone: From the Taiwanese Accent in Miss Andy to the Silent Sinophone in Abang Adik
  • 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

3:30-3:45pm (coffee and tea break)

3:45-5:00pm Panel 3: Visibility and Pleasure in Sinophone Queer Media
Panel Chair: Alvin K. Wong

  • Wenxuan Xue (PhD Candidate, Tufts) Sensing Minor Sinophone in Wu Tsang’s DUILIAN
  • Colin Y. Yang (PhD Candidate U Bristol) Queer Visibility in the Age of Platform Capitalism: How queer vlogs perform subversive queer politics in China?
  • Zhifan Sheng (PhD U Washington) Qiu Miaojin and the Remediation of Queer Letters in Sinophone New Media Art

5:00-5:30pm: Roundtable and concluding remarks (all presenters)