This panel intervenes in scholarship on memory and historiography in Global Asias by centering gender, sexuality, and media as constitutive rather than supplementary to the production of historical knowledge. Beginning with the classical women’s question, the session reconsiders it through a queer feminist lens. Here, queer does not simply denote LGBTQ identities or communities, but also names a broader existential category and critical method for thinking about how women negotiate violence, social norms, historical rupture, and the possibility of becoming otherwise. Bringing together literary analysis, film studies, and critical theory across Chinese, Hong Kong, Korean, and Asian American contexts, this panel challenges prevailing frameworks that privilege national archives, linear temporality, and masculinist narratives of war and revolution.

The panel opens with an examination of cultural representations of sexual violence in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Focusing on Zhang Ling’s A Single Swallow (2017), the first paper explores how women navigate and mobilize sexual shame under patriarchal and nationalist frameworks. Rather than remaining a passive site of injury, the protagonist Ah Yan repurposes shame as a form of resistance, challenges the mechanisms of social shaming and the stigma of lost chastity, and exposes male hypocrisy through the very national sentiment that seeks to discipline her. In doing so, the paper argues, she moves from being perceived as a “raped object” to becoming a new female subject, embodying a queer reconfiguration of self and a reclamation of sexual agency.

The second paper turns to revolutionary historiography through the figure of Jiang Qing, tracing her political afterlife across two competing biographical forms: the rumored Hong Kong volume The Red Empress (1973) and Roxane Witke’s Comrade Chiang Ch’ing (1977). Rather than simply opposing fiction to truth, the paper shows how rumor and biography become entangled in the production of historical judgment. Jiang appears in these texts not only as a revolutionary exemplar or traitorous villain, but as a gendered figure onto whom anxieties about visibility, loyalty, and ideological excess are projected. By foregrounding the circulation of these narratives and Jiang Qing’s self-presentation to foreign audiences, the paper reframes gendered memory as a media problem: how narrative forms govern historiography after political catastrophe.

Building on the question of alternative archives, the third paper examines queer kinship in Kim Hye-jin’s novella Concerning My Daughter (2017) and Ray Yeung’s film All Shall Be Well (2024). Across South Korean and Hong Kong contexts, queer intimacy emerges as a counter-archive against institutional and legal erasure. By juxtaposing forward-oriented horizons of queer becoming with retrospective acts of memorialization after loss, the paper demonstrates how kinship itself can function as a historiographic intervention and produce alternative temporalities of belonging and remembrance outside state-recognized genealogies.

The final paper moves into Asian American literary contexts, examining how women writers confront inherited histories of trauma and racialized authorship. Through R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface (2023) and Yiyun Li’s “A Small Flame” (2017), it asks what it means to write from, or refuse, ancestral history. Rather than treating historical inheritance as a stable genealogy, the paper foregrounds the ethical tension between market-driven ethnic legibility and the refusal of imposed lineage. In this sense, storytelling becomes an unresolved site of self-interrogation, where emancipation lies not in closure but in the ongoing practice of questioning authority, inheritance, and narrative ownership.

Together, four papers collectively show how trauma and memory are themselves gendered and mediated. From the mobilization of shame in wartime literature to the construction of queer kinship as counter-archive, from the circulation of rumor in revolutionary historiography to the uneasy positionality of Asian American women writers confronting inherited trauma, the panel reveals how marginalized subjects negotiate visibility, refuse imposed genealogies, and imagine alternative temporalities and forms of belonging. By doing so, it offers a transnational framework for rethinking memory, ethics, and women’s emancipation in Asian contexts.