The Queer Asia book series opens a space for monographs and anthologies in all disciplines focused on non-normative sexuality and gender cultures, identities and practices in Asia. Queer Studies and Queer Theory originated in and remain dominated by North American and European academic circles, and existing publishing has followed these tendencies. However, growing numbers of scholars inside and beyond Asia are producing work that challenges and corrects this imbalance. The Queer Asia book series
– first of its kind in publishing – provides a valuable opportunity for developing and sustaining these initiatives.
Other queer-themed HKUP books include Queer Asia is As Normal As Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in China and Hong Kong, edited by Yau Ching, and Fran Martin's Situating Sexuality: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture
.
This is the first book in English to analyse the stunning rise of cultures of dissident sexuality in Taiwan during the 1990s. It approaches the queer sexualities represented in recent Taiwanese fiction, film and public culture as dynamic formations that combine local knowledge with globalizing discourses on gay and lesbian identity to produce sexualities that are multiple, shifting and inherently hybrid. The book challenges the Eurocentrism of much queer theory to date. Consistently critical of essentializing accounts of ‘Chinese’ culture, it highlights some of the important ways in which Taiwanese formations of dissident sexuality differ from the familiar Euro-American formations.
* As Normal as Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in China and Hong Kong
Drawing from the fields of ethnographic and sociological studies, cultural activism, public health and film studies, this volume poses new and exciting challenges to queer studies and demonstrates the study of Chinese sexuality as an emergent field currently emanating from multiple disciplines.--Issues related to sexuality have acquired a new visibility in China in the past several years. The growth of religious fundamentalists and global gay discourses, heightened media attention and even more intense censorship, LBGTIQ activist movements, struggles of sex workers, have all contributed to this visibility. There is an urgent need for intellectual work to articulate and analyze the complexity of issues of sexuality, and the ways in which different norms line up and become synonymous with one another, in order to build situated knowledge in strengthening the discursive power of non-normative sexual-subjects-in-alliance. This book showcases the work of emerging and established scholars working mostly outside Euro-America and focuses on cities including Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. It is one of the first sustained collections on Chinese non-normative sexual subjectivities and contemporary sexual politics published in English. It highlights the various ways in which different individuals and communities--including male sex workers, transsexual subjects, lesbians and Indonesian migrants--negotiate with notions of normativity and modernity, fine-tuned according to the different power structures of each context, and making new and different meanings.--This is a key text for students, scholars and cultural workers interested in issues of gender and sexuality, queer studies, Chinese cultures and societies, migration studies, cultural sociology, film and cinema studies, performance studies and pornography.
Yau Ching teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong
* Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China
, 1900-1950 (Queer Asia), 1900-1950
This is the most serious study to date on the topic of male same-sex relations in China during the early twentieth century, illuminating male same-sex relations in many sites: language, translated sexological writings, literary works, tabloid newspapers, and opera. Documenting how nationalism and colonial modernity reconfigured Chinese discourses on sex between men in the early twentieth century, Wenqing Kang has amassed a wealth of material previously overlooked by scholars, such as the entertainment news and opinion pieces related to same-sex relations published in the tabloid press. He sheds new light on several puzzles, such as the process whereby sex between men became increasingly stigmatized in China between the 1910s and 1940s, and shows that the rich vocabulary and concepts that existed for male-male relations in premodern China continued to be used by journalists and writers throughout the Republican era, creating the conditions for receiving Western sexology.
* Philippine Gay Culture
Offers a descriptive survey of popular and academic writings on and by Filipino male homosexuals as well as a genealogy of discourses and performativities of male homosexuality - and the bakla and/or gay identity that they effectively materialized - in urban Philippines since the 1960s.
J. Neil C. Garcia is professor of English, creative writing, and comparative literature at University of the Philippines. He is the author of numerous poetry collections and works of cultural criticism, including Postcolonialism and Filipino Poetics: Essays and Critiques.
* Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (Sexuality Studies)
"Undercurrents" engages the critical rubric of 'queer' to examine Hong Kong's screen and media culture during the transitional and immediate postcolonial period. Helen Hok-Sze Leung draws on theoretical insights from a range of disciplines to reveal parallels between the crisis and uncertainty of the territory's postcolonial transition and the queer aspects of its cultural productions. "Undercurrents" uncovers a queer media culture that has been largely overlooked by critics in the West, and demonstrates the cultural vitality of Hong Kong amidst political transition.
HELEN HOK-SZE LEUNG is an assistant professor in women's studies at Simon Fraser University.
Buy the books here.
– first of its kind in publishing – provides a valuable opportunity for developing and sustaining these initiatives.Other queer-themed HKUP books include Queer Asia is As Normal As Possible: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in China and Hong Kong
, edited by Yau Ching, and Fran Martin's Situating Sexuality: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture.
This is the first book in English to analyse the stunning rise of cultures of dissident sexuality in Taiwan during the 1990s. It approaches the queer sexualities represented in recent Taiwanese fiction, film and public culture as dynamic formations that combine local knowledge with globalizing discourses on gay and lesbian identity to produce sexualities that are multiple, shifting and inherently hybrid. The book challenges the Eurocentrism of much queer theory to date. Consistently critical of essentializing accounts of ‘Chinese’ culture, it highlights some of the important ways in which Taiwanese formations of dissident sexuality differ from the familiar Euro-American formations.* As Normal as Possible
: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in China and Hong Kong
Drawing from the fields of ethnographic and sociological studies, cultural activism, public health and film studies, this volume poses new and exciting challenges to queer studies and demonstrates the study of Chinese sexuality as an emergent field currently emanating from multiple disciplines.--Issues related to sexuality have acquired a new visibility in China in the past several years. The growth of religious fundamentalists and global gay discourses, heightened media attention and even more intense censorship, LBGTIQ activist movements, struggles of sex workers, have all contributed to this visibility. There is an urgent need for intellectual work to articulate and analyze the complexity of issues of sexuality, and the ways in which different norms line up and become synonymous with one another, in order to build situated knowledge in strengthening the discursive power of non-normative sexual-subjects-in-alliance. This book showcases the work of emerging and established scholars working mostly outside Euro-America and focuses on cities including Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. It is one of the first sustained collections on Chinese non-normative sexual subjectivities and contemporary sexual politics published in English. It highlights the various ways in which different individuals and communities--including male sex workers, transsexual subjects, lesbians and Indonesian migrants--negotiate with notions of normativity and modernity, fine-tuned according to the different power structures of each context, and making new and different meanings.--This is a key text for students, scholars and cultural workers interested in issues of gender and sexuality, queer studies, Chinese cultures and societies, migration studies, cultural sociology, film and cinema studies, performance studies and pornography.Yau Ching teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong
* Obsession: Male Same-Sex Relations in China
, 1900-1950 (Queer Asia), 1900-1950
This is the most serious study to date on the topic of male same-sex relations in China during the early twentieth century, illuminating male same-sex relations in many sites: language, translated sexological writings, literary works, tabloid newspapers, and opera. Documenting how nationalism and colonial modernity reconfigured Chinese discourses on sex between men in the early twentieth century, Wenqing Kang has amassed a wealth of material previously overlooked by scholars, such as the entertainment news and opinion pieces related to same-sex relations published in the tabloid press. He sheds new light on several puzzles, such as the process whereby sex between men became increasingly stigmatized in China between the 1910s and 1940s, and shows that the rich vocabulary and concepts that existed for male-male relations in premodern China continued to be used by journalists and writers throughout the Republican era, creating the conditions for receiving Western sexology.* Philippine Gay Culture
Offers a descriptive survey of popular and academic writings on and by Filipino male homosexuals as well as a genealogy of discourses and performativities of male homosexuality - and the bakla and/or gay identity that they effectively materialized - in urban Philippines since the 1960s.J. Neil C. Garcia is professor of English, creative writing, and comparative literature at University of the Philippines. He is the author of numerous poetry collections and works of cultural criticism, including Postcolonialism and Filipino Poetics: Essays and Critiques.
* Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (Sexuality Studies)
"Undercurrents" engages the critical rubric of 'queer' to examine Hong Kong's screen and media culture during the transitional and immediate postcolonial period. Helen Hok-Sze Leung draws on theoretical insights from a range of disciplines to reveal parallels between the crisis and uncertainty of the territory's postcolonial transition and the queer aspects of its cultural productions. "Undercurrents" uncovers a queer media culture that has been largely overlooked by critics in the West, and demonstrates the cultural vitality of Hong Kong amidst political transition.HELEN HOK-SZE LEUNG is an assistant professor in women's studies at Simon Fraser University.
Buy the books here
.
