ICGC Alum Book Talk: Shana Ye, “Queer Chimerica: Speculation and the Futur(h)istory of Homopostsocialism”
537 Heller Hall (ICGC)
What’s the relationship between the discourse of queer fluidity and the rise of China since the 1990s? In what ways are queer history and futurity shaped by shifts in global postsocialist conditions? What stories are amplified or sidelined through the performativity and theatricality of queer politics? And what does it mean to write queerness as critical fabulations?
Blending archival work, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic arts, and science fiction, Shana Ye’s Queer Chimerica: A Speculative Auto/Ethnography (2024) unpacks the ways in which the transnational circulation of queer culture, politics, and institutions are structured through the antagonist interdependence of China and the United States. In this talk, the author will share stories about queer party cadres in the Cultural Revolution, tongzhi activism and HIV/AIDS community outreach after the Tiananmen upheaval, feminist artists and digital activists under Xi Jingping’s China, and fictional figures of future empire “Chimerica” to show the messiness of queer memory and world-making. The talk will offer insight into the governmentality of LGBT rights, the rules of legibility and recognition, and the geo- and bio-politics of identity, unveiling the uneven distributions of capital, knowledge, affect, and opportunity that reproduce queer precarity and agency.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies
Light refreshments will be provided.
About the Speaker
Dr. Shana Ye is associate professor of Women and Gender Studies at University of Toronto Scarborough and in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her research lies at the intersection of transnational feminism, queer studies, post/socialist studies and theories of affect and trauma. Shana also writes about death, technology and AIs, and speculative fictions.
Weaving together ethnography, history, memoir, science fiction, graphic arts and cultural critique, Shana’s monograph Queer Chimerica: A Speculative Auto/Ethnography of the Cool Child (2024) examines the intersections of queer theory and the rise of China to reveal how queerness is “produced” through the interdependence of China and the United States since the late Cold War. Centering on “impossible” subjects such as sodomites in the Cultural Revolution, rural queer migrants, gay men in HIV/AIDS movements, and LGBT activists in the institutionalization of queer Chinese studies and transnational grassroots queer/feminist activism, Queer Chimerica explores the relationship between the discourse of queer fluidity and capital’s demands for labor flexibility, bringing to the forefront questions of representation, queer mode of knowing, and the sexualized, gendered, and racialized power relations in transnational queer praxis. Check out the book here: https://press.umich.edu/Books/Q/Queer-Chimerica3
Shana’s second book project, Silicon Yellow: Sojourner Colonialism and The Aesthetics of Techno-Chimerica explore the racialized construction of Chineseness in relation to technology, the (in)animate body, and the visualization of geopower. Examining the assemblage of the raw (the yellow earth, poverty, desert and deserted land, sandstorms, etc.) and the synthetic (over-photoshopped femininity, silicon sex toys, doll-like women, copycat, cellphone chips wafers, etc.) that characterizes the aestheticization of Chineseness, this book unpacks the power that enables new form of techno-gentrification, heteropatriarchy, and racial-ethnic extractive capitalism.
Shana is also working on a co-edited book volume on queer archive and several side projects such as on COVID-19 affect and memory, Generative AIs and Digital Afterlife, and Queer Quantum Theory.
Shana sees the goal of feminist education and research as to advance social justice. She is committed not only to increasing LGBTQ visibility in the classroom and professional venues, but also to “queering” the academic institution by challenging its systemic sexism, heteronormativity, classism, ableism and meritocracy through experiential pedagogy and creative methods. Shana holds a PhD in Feminist Studies and in Developmental Studies and Social Change from the University of Minnesota (2017). She has served on the governing boards of Society for Queer Asian Studies (SQAS) affiliated with Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and North American Asian Feminist Collaborative (NAAF) caucus at National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA).