"Decolonizing Transgender History: Eunuchs, Renyao, and Adju," with Dr. Howard Chiang (UC Santa Barbara)

Zoom and in person, PL-217, and on Zoom https://csusb.zoom.us/j/388207496

This 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. 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. Doing trans history this way unveils some of the most salient problems that have plagued the methods of historical inquiry. These problems include (1) the imposition of contemporary Western categories, such as transgender, on the distanced past or colonized societies, (2) the failure to account for female gender/sexual transgression in most social histories outside the West, and (3) the neglect of racial capitalism and settler colonialism in regions beyond North America and Australia. The conceptual limits and propensity of three historical exemplars from the Sinophone Pacific—eunuchs, renyao, and adju—will be examined in depth to remedy these flaws of epistemic convention.

Dr. Howard Chiang, Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies, holds the Lai Ho & Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies. He has written two award-winning monographs on China, forming a duology of queer Asian Pacific history through the lens of knowledge production. 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. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History (2019), a landmark 3-volume reference compendium. He is currently completing Trans Without Borders (under contract).

For questions, please contact Jeremy Murray (History), jmurray@csusb.edu

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