In recent years, the field of queer Asian studies has challenged the Eurocentric basis of queer theory. While queer of color critique and the theory of homonationalism have examined how the legalization of gay marriage and inclusion of LGBTQ subjects in the biopolitics of US empire gave rise to queer liberalism, queer diaspora studies (Gopinath 2005 and 2018; Manalansan 2003; Eng 2010) critiques the assumption of North America as the site of queer modernity. This transnational turn of queer theory has generated new debates in queer Chinese studies and queer Sinophone studies.

While queer Marxism in the writings by Petrus Liu (2005; 2022) locate in the “two Chinas” framework a leftist genealogy that presumes a non-liberal account of Chinese queerness alternative to queer liberalism in the West, queer Sinophone theories by Howard Chiang, Alvin K. Wong, and Shana Ye mobilize concepts of transtopia, queer Chimerica, and unruly comparison (Chiang 2021; Ye 2024; Wong 2025) that question any essentialist claim to queer Chineseness. In other words, this body of queer Sinophone scholarship emphasizes the place-based and multidirectional aspects of queer Sinophone sexual modernity and cultural formations, which highlight processes of migration, entanglement of Chinese and US empires, and settler colonialism. This panel further expands the parameter of queer Sinophone theory by mapping new directions for queering Sinophone genders and kinship.

First, queer Sinophone theorist Howard Chiang explores a case of “memory crisis” in Republican Chinese gendered modernity by imbricating lesbian desire and trans masculinity. Specifically, on April 23, 1947, the Shanghai police raided a private gathering and arrested six women for committing the crimes of indecent exposure and opium smoking. The police interrogation focused on the presence of material objects, including a rubber dildo, as well as the ambiguous relationship between the party host Shen Junru and her alleged lover Zhou Shuzhen. Dissecting Shen’s case in the 1940s, Chiang’s paper addresses the social history of female gender transgression and homoeroticism. It demonstrates that the Chinese trans category of renyao (human-monster) provides a useful lens to unpack the intertwined nature of the historical homophobia and transphobia experienced by Chinese women.

Next, Shana Ye turns to a different kind of “archive” that intersects AI, humanities, and new Sinophone gender categories. Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT generate coherent outputs that appear natural through probabilistic pattern recognition rather than embodied understanding of the world. As a result, articulations of gender and queerness became algorithmic-like, obscuring the complex relationship between racialization, displacement and fluidity. Alternatively, Ye proposes the concept of “quantum gender” to describe gender as a state of superposition, an indeterminate condition, in which multiple and contradictory possibilities exist simultaneously. Different from gender being a “binary,” quantum gender emphasizes the portioned experiences of Asian Xenophone subjects shaped by linguistic and knowledge acquisition in cross-border practices. To illustrate this point, Ye draws on examples from Sinophone readers of Boys’ Love and other androgynous pop culture. Overall, this paper explores Asian racialization through the lens of in-humanization.

The last paper by Alvin K. Wong further queers Sinophone gender and kinship politics by thinking beyond the affect of queer liberalism in postcolonial Hong Kong. Recent critiques of queer liberalism and homonationalism by queer theorists such as David L. Eng (2010) and Jasbir K. Puar (2007) have examined how the rights to privacy, gay marriage, and inclusion of LGBT subjects as patriots mark the arrival of queer liberalism. While these US-centric leftist critiques powerfully dissect the convergence of LGBT mainstream politics and the necropolitics of US empire, how the affect of queer liberalism translates within the state-managed postcolonial modernity of global Asia is often unexamined. This paper examines how aging lesbians negotiate rights to privacy, kinship ties, tolerance, and rights to inheritance in postcolonial Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China that has yet to legalize gay marriage and anti-discrimination laws based on sexual orientation. Wong analyzes how lesbians practice forms of affect beyond the fold of queer liberalism in the queer film All Shall Be Well (2024, dir. Ray Yeung).

Overall, the three papers offer diverse and transdisciplinary perspectives for queering Sinophone gender and kinship politics. Chiang, Ye, and Wong’s papers respectively demonstrate how queer Sinophone studies can bridge lesbian and trans studies, rethink language models, AI, and sexuality, and ultimately queer kinship beyond the limit of queer liberalism. Each speaker will speak for 18 minutes, leaving 20 minutes for Q&A.