Unruly Comparison

Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong and coeditor of Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies.

“Unruly Comparison cements Alvin K. Wong’s reputation as a leading scholar of queer Sinophone studies. The book’s proposal for and practice of a new theory of unruly comparison is as innovative and persuasive as its eloquent interventions in the Eurocentrism of queer studies, China-centrism of area studies, and exceptionalism of Hong Kong studies. It is a must-read for all scholars in queer studies, area studies, and Sinophone studies.” - Shu-mei Shih, Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Humanities, University of California, Los Angeles “In this remarkable book Alvin K. Wong brings Hong Kong queer culture into critical dialogue with Western queer studies while complicating the China-centrism of both mainland Chinese nationalism and the disciplinary conventions of East Asian area studies. He asks how a range of queer genders and sexualities might contest singular universal forms of ‘Chineseness’ to imagine subject and community apart from the reproductive logic that forms the core of nationalism’s most conventional formulations. Wong also elaborates queer Hong Kong as a source of critique of the hierarchy between an ‘original’ China and its allegedly ‘lesser’ Sinophone copies.” - Lisa Lowe, author of (The Intimacies of Four Continents)

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction. Queer Hong Kong across the Transpacific Sinophone  11. Queer Hong Kong as a Sinophone Method: An Archival Undoing  232. Postcoloniality Beyond China-Centrism: South-South Transnationalism and Queer Sinophone Localism in Hong Kong Cinema  413. Transnationalizing Transgender: Tracey, Queer Globalities, and Sinophone Regionalism  614. Queer Sinophone Intimacies: Visualizing Queer Migrant Domestic Workers  875. Trespassing the Sinophone Border: On Fruit Chan’s Prostitute Trilogy  115Epilogue  135Notes  145Filmography  157Bibliography  159Index  171