Authors
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Howard Chiang
Department of History
University of California, Davis
Abstract
This essay outlines the programmatic contours of a new keyword, transtopia, which refers to different scales of gender transgression that are not always recognizable through the Western notion of transgender. The methods of comparative racialization, native diversification, and archival politicization comprise an epistemological overhaul in which transness is made globally legible in a non-hierarchical way. Using examples from the early modern Ottoman empire, colonial India, and modern Sinophone culture, this essay relocates the legibility of eunuchism from transgender to transtopian history. By challenging the modern West as the privileged site of trans theoretical production, a transtopian hermeneutic directs attention to the web of interrelations forged between historical actors and their con/texts from which transness gains intelligibility and signification.
Author Biography
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Howard Chiang, Department of History
University of California, Davis
Howard Chiang's research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the Sinophone world, with an emphasis on sexuality, the body, and the human sciences. A parallel strand of his investigative thinking has been oriented towards the reciprocal interactions of science studies and area studies. Broadly speaking, his interests are situated at the intersections of modern Chinese and East Asian history, the history of science and medicine, the study of gender, sexuality, and the body in comparative and global contexts, theories of empire, and Sinophone postcolonial studies (esp. Taiwan and Hong Kong). In integrating all these fields, he is completing a manuscript titled "After Eunuchs: Science and the Transformations of Sex in Modern China." He has embarked on a second project tentatively called "Titrating Tradition: Chinese Culture and the Queer Origins of Global Health." With Hsiu-fen Chen, he currently codirects an AHRC-funded research network on "China and the Human Sciences: 1600 to the Present" (2014-16). He is affiliated with the Global History and Culture Centre and the Centre for the History of Medicine and serves as the director of the MA Course in Global History.
