Title
Transtopia and the Narrative Thresholds of History
Abstract
This lecture was the second keynote address for the 2024 Trans Asia Graduate Student Conference. This virtual lecture, which was sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies, discussed 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, were used to reframe the politics of knowledge production in order to narrate and historicize episodes of displaced sovereignty.
Biography
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).