A talk focusing on transgender history in China will lead off the spring semester’s Modern China Lecture Series when it resumes on Feb. 19.

"Decolonizing Transgender History: Eunuchs, Renyao, and Adju," presented by Howard Chiang, professor of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara, will begin at 10:30 a.m. in the John M. Pfau Library, room PL-217, and via Zoom at https://csusb.zoom.us/j/388207496.  

Chiang, and the guest speakers who will follow him, will present their research on a variety of topics, from the Hollywood glamour of Anna May Wong to the future of Hong Kong, with some of the featured guests joining in person and some via Zoom. No sign-in or sign-up is required, and all are welcome to join in person or on Zoom.

Chiang’s talk “expands on the concept of transtopia to posit a continuum model of transness, thereby activating a mode of historical inquiry that exceeds both the transphobia of the past and the transgender presumption of the present,” according to an abstract of the presentation. “That is, it challenges both the assumption that gender nonconforming figures did not exist historically and the idea that the Western category of transgender delivers the best framework for understanding their experience.”

The Lai Ho & Wu Cho-Liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies at UC Santa Barbara, Chiang is the author of two award-winning monographs on China. “After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China” (2018) analyzes the history of sex change in China from the demise of castration in the late Qing era to the emergence of transsexuality in Cold War Taiwan. “Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific” (2021) proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. 

The Modern China Lecture Series was initiated in January 2014 to promote awareness of important issues related to China for those on the CSUSB campus and in the community. Since then, it has presented more than 100 lectures, workshops, film screenings and roundtable forums featuring China scholars from UC San Diego, UC Riverside, the Claremont Colleges, UCLA, USC, UC Irvine, Columbia, Oxford and other institutions, who have visited the CSUSB campus or joined via video conference to share their expertise and opinions.

Upcoming programs will take place on different days of the week, different times and different locations; however, the Zoom link will remain the same. Also, some talks will feature book giveaways for attendees in a free raffle.

The spring semester Modern China Lecture Series schedule:  

For more information on the Modern China Lecture Series, contact Jeremy Murray at jmurray@csusb.edu.