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Unruly Comparison
Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone
Alvin K. Wong
Duke University Press, 2025
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 protest. 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.
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front cover of An Unseen Unheard Minority
An Unseen Unheard Minority
Asian American Students at the University of Illinois
Sharon S. Lee
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Higher education hails Asian American students as model minorities who face no educational barriers given their purported cultural values of hard work and political passivity. Described as “over-represented,” Asian Americans have been overlooked in discussions about diversity; however, racial hostility continues to affect Asian American students, and they have actively challenged their invisibility in minority student discussions. This study details the history of Asian American student activism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, as students rejected the university’s definition of minority student needs that relied on a model minority myth, measures of under-representation, and a Black-White racial model, concepts that made them an “unseen unheard minority.” This activism led to the creation on campus of one of the largest Asian American Studies programs and Asian American cultural centers in the Midwest. Their histories reveal the limitations of understanding minority student needs solely along measures of under-representation and the realities of race for Asian American college students.
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front cover of Unsettling Acts
Unsettling Acts
Performing Transnational Adoption
Jieun Lee
The Ohio State University Press, 2025

Analyzing contemporary theater and performance works about Korean transnational adoption, Jieun Lee’s Unsettling Acts: Performing Transnational Adoption challenges longstanding ideas about adoption. Lee contends that in staging adoptees’ birth family searches and reunions, theater and performance artists unsettle dominant discourses that have essentialized adoptees through ethnonationalist, gendered, and postwar humanitarian narratives in both birth and adoptive cultures. In doing so, Lee reveals how these performances engage in acts of disavowal of and resistance to mythologies of adoption and adoptee experience. Lee examines twelve works—from South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Denmark—including plays, musicals, solo performances, community-based theater, and performance art. Through her analysis, theater and performance becomes a means for reimagining adoptees’ identity, kinship, and sense of belonging. Further, these pieces encourage critical exploration of the history, politics, and social impacts of Korean transnational adoption. These works thus nurture a countermemory to engender redressive accountability and transpacific justice, pointing a way forward for remaking the transnational adoptee experience in the twenty-first century.

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