This lecture will be the second keynote address for the 2024 Trans Asia Graduate Student Conference. It will take place in Ingraham 206.
This lecture, which is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies, will discuss the programmatic contours and major interventions of a new keyword, transtopia, to theorize different scales of gender transgression that are not always discernible through the Western notion of transgender. Examples from the Sinophone Pacific, ranging from global sex change to the queer indigenous movement, will be used to reframe the politics of knowledge production in order to narrate and historicize episodes of displaced sovereignty.
Prof. Howard Chiang holds the Lai Ho & Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Taiwan Studies. He is the author of two award-winning monographs: After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia University Press, 2021).
