Dr. Grace En-Yi Ting (Gender Studies Programme, The University of Hong Kong)

Queer feminist writing — on lived experiences of gender, race, and queerness — resists mainstream understandings of what “counts” as theory or scholarship. What does it mean for a junior scholar to undertake these forms of writing and speaking in the academy today?

In this talk, I take up my embodiment as a “woman of color” academic to trace my positionality in transnational movements between the United States, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Namely, I reflect upon my recent publications that center on such experiences, as well as the process of choosing to undertake and then continue with this work as a queer and feminist studies scholar. Out of necessity, such writing draws not only from fields closest to my training — Japanese studies and queer theory — but also from women of color and Asian American feminisms, transnational feminisms, and Sinophone studies.

But how do I seek to translate queer feminist writing and experience for others? Hong Kong has served as an irreplaceable site of becoming where my aims as a queer feminist have been sharpened and even dramatically transformed in response to the political contexts in which I now write and teach. Teaching and writing have equally shaped my life during difficult times. Given arguments concerning the “defeat” or “collapse” of Hong Kong feminism, I end by considering the significance of what I call “queer feminist theory” in Hong Kong today.