Introduction - queer Sinophone studies: Interdisciplinary synergies

Abstract

Queer theory and Sinophone studies share certain strong conceptual affinity because, strictly speaking, both the notions of the queer and the Sinophone resist the doxa and hegemony of binary thinking, essentialism, and disciplinarity. The early 1990s seems to mark a moment when queer theory emerged onto the intellectual and social horizon in both North America and globally. Perhaps the most distinctive genealogical rupture advanced in this book concerns the expansion of queer Sinophone studies into the methodologies of the social sciences. Whereas Chen’s chapter assumes an archive-based historical method, Kam’s and Madson’s chapters implement an ethnographic approach to illuminate queer experiences in Sinophone Taiwan and Hong Kong. In taking a more free-flowing, playful, and transdisciplinary approach to surveying the field of queer Sinophone studies, this volume necessarily builds on and complicates existing volumes and scholarship on the keyword approach.