Sexuality and/as Disability in China and Taiwan

In this end-of-term event, we invited Dr. Sarah Dauncey from Nottingham University and Dr. Chi Ta-wei （紀大偉）from National Chengchi University (Taiwan 國立政治大學) to talk about the representations of sexuality and disability in Sinophone cultural discourses across the Taiwan Strait. Their papers and dialogue focused on the entangled developments in the conceptualisation about disability and sexuality in cold-war Taiwan and contemporary China, often mediated by the political movements in the United States. While grounded in the various achival evidence they dug up in their respective national contexts, Dr. Chi and Dr. Dauncey's dialogue explored the possiblity of forging a comparative turn in our current theoretical understanding about the Sinophone world and the challenges of using marginalised identities as a way to achieve this. They also reflected on the role of linguistic as well as cultural translation in such Sinophone comparisons as the US still looms large as a prominent ideological force affecting how biopolitical identities are conceived in East Asia.

Each speaker spoke for around 15 minutes and left plenty of time for critical dialogue and discussion.

This event was hosted by the Oxford Chinese Studies Society and the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) Research Centre.