In his forthcoming book, Alvin K. Wong (The University of Hong Kong) examines queerness in Hong Kong through a transdisciplinary analysis of Sinophone literature, cinema, visual culture, and civil society.
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383
In Unruly Comparison, Alvin K. Wong examines queerness in Hong Kong through a transdisciplinary analysis of Sinophone literature, cinema, visual culture, and civil society. Moving beyond Eurocentrism in queer theory and China-centrism in area studies, Wong frames Hong Kong as a model for global comparison by theorizing a method of unruly comparison—acknowledging the incommensurability of cultural texts and queer figures across different temporal and spatial locations. Here, unruly comparison positions Hong Kong as an undefinable time-space that troubles historicist, colonial, and China-centric renderings of the city as merely a site of British colonial legacy, Chinese rule, or global capital. Wong analyzes queer interracial desire in WWII; a cinema of gay male cosmopolitanism; queer intimacy among migrant workers; trans visuality and legality; cross-border sex work; and the queer diaspora of Hong Kong after the 2019 protests. Through Wong’s readings, Hong Kong becomes a queer region of racial, gender, and sexual incommensurability. By foregrounding the friction, asymmetry, and perverse juxtapositions of unruly comparison of Hong Kong with the Sinophone world, Wong reframes key debates in queer theory and East Asian studies.
Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is also the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC). Professor Wong’s research spans across the fields of queer theory, Hong Kong literature and cinema, Chinese literary and cultural studies, Sinophone studies, transnational feminism, and the environmental humanities. His book Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone is forthcoming from Duke University Press in Spring 2025. Unruly Comparison theorizes Hong Kong as a queer region of racial, gender, and sexual incommensurability, which forms a perverse relationality to the world through asymmetrical comparisons. This queer unruly methodology actualizes Hong Kong as a queer Sinophone site for rethinking the stakes of comparison, area studies, Sinophone theory, and transnational queer studies. He has published in journals such as Journal of Lesbian Studies, Gender, Place & Culture, Culture, Theory, and Critique, Concentric, Cultural Dynamics, Continuum, JCMS, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Interventions and in edited volumes such as Transgender China, Queer Sinophone Cultures, Filming the Everyday, Fredric Jameson and Film Theory, Sinophone Utopias, Queer TV China, and Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines. He also coedited the volume Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies (Routledge, 2020). Wong is an associate editor of the Journal of Intercultural Studies (Taylor & Francis) and currently serves as Vice-Chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies (3S). With Daniel Elam, Wong is the coeditor of the HKU Press book series, Entanglements: Rethinking Comparison in the Long Contemporary. A comprehensive list of his publications can be found here: https://hku-hk.academia.edu/AlvinKWong.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies