Dear Colleagues,
We are organizing a panel for the 2027 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Conference in Boston and are seeking one to two additional paper presenters.
Our panel explores how transgender and gender nonconforming life in Asia is mediated through uneven regimes of care, mobility, and bodily transformation. we foreground trans embodiment as a site where care, legibility, and livability are negotiated through restrictive institutions, market logics, spatial mobilities, community networks, and embodied practices. The panel aims to shift attention from identity alone to medical systems, body modification, gender varnaculars, and techniques of self-fashioning that condition livable trans lives.
We have confirmed a chair, a discussant, and two panelists. Our confirmed panel presentations include:
- non-binary bodybuilding culture in Taiwan, zhongxing aesthetics, and the use of top surgery
- Chinese transfem's use of travel to Thailand for surgery to revise the chronopolitics of gender-affirming care in China
We welcome proposals that examine trans and nonbinary life in and across Asia that engage with embodiment and bodily materiality, including but not limited to:
- advocacy, politics, and community engagement
- aesthetics, self-expression, local gender vernaculars
- medicine, technologies, articulations of science and modernity
- care, mutual-aids, kinship
- colonialism and emerging hierarchies of race, ethnicity, and nationality
- digital representation, networks, and community formations
- intimacies, socialities, and trans* sexualities
- labor, work, and migration
- education and pedagogy
- oral histories and trans social reproduction
- objects, things, material culture
- temporality and spatiality
- capitalism, (post)-socialism, and neoliberalism
- biopolitics and necropolitics
- ecologies, environment, bodily becomings
If your work might fit this panel, or if you know someone whose research would be a good match, please send a 250-word abstract and a short bio, or feel free to contact us for more information.
Siufung Law (they/them): wan.ling.law@emory.edu
Thelma Wang (she/they): thelmaw@mit.edu
We warmly welcome submissions from scholars at all career stages.
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Thelma Wang (she/they)
MIT
thelmaw@mit.edu------------------------------