Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone

by Alvin K. Wong

Overview

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 protests. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478060888
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	04/18/2025
Series:	Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Queer Hong Kong across the Transpacific Sinophone  1
1. Queer Hong Kong as a Sinophone Method: An Archival Undoing  23
2. Postcoloniality Beyond China-Centrism: South-South Transnationalism and Queer Sinophone Localism in Hong Kong Cinema  41
3. Transnationalizing Transgender: Tracey, Queer Globalities, and Sinophone Regionalism  61
4. Queer Sinophone Intimacies: Visualizing Queer Migrant Domestic Workers  87
5. Trespassing the Sinophone Border: On Fruit Chan’s Prostitute Trilogy  115
Epilogue  135
Notes  145
Filmography  157
Bibliography  159
Index  171

Editorial Reviews

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.

The Intimacies of Four Continents - Lisa Lowe

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