About

Howard Chiang is a Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, holding the Lai Ho & Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies. He also holds courtesy appointments in History and Feminist Studies. His research centers on Sinophone studies, queer Asian Pacific history, and the historical and conceptual foundations of the human sciences, including psychoanalysis, cultural psychiatry, and racial science. Chiang has authored a trilogy of monographs in Sinophone studies, exploring topics such as the history of sex change in modern China, transgender history in the Sinophone Pacific, and Taiwan's international status in relation to transness. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History and is involved in editing multiple academic series. His work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, and he has previously taught at NYU, the University of Warwick, the University of Waterloo, and UC Davis. Prior to his current position, he served as the Director of the Center for Taiwan Studies at UCSB and was the founding chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art history
• Computer Science
• Literature
• Ethnology
• Anthropology
• History
• Art
• Political Science
• Gerontology
• Library science
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychology
• Aesthetics
• Philosophy
• Law
• Media studies
• Epistemology
• Medicine
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Wayne Soon. <i>Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2025-03-01

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• Taiwan Extra and the Future of Sinophone Studies

  International Journal of Taiwan Studies · 2025-12-17

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• The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China by Matthew H. Sommer (review)

  Journal of the History of Sexuality · 2025-04-29

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 2 Stonewall Aside: When Queer Theory Meets Sinophone Studies

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2024-10-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Sexuality and the Rise of China: The Post-1990s Gay Generation in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2024-03-26 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Sexuality and the Rise of China draws on interviews with ninety young gay men with an average age of roughly twenty-four, proportionally sampled and distributed across Taipei, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. In the introduction, Travis S. K. Kong states his objective unambiguously: by investigating this “post-1990s” cohort, the study aims to capture the texture of gay life and subjectivity in a generational way. To the extent that this denotes an explicit goal, the book represents a magnificent accomplishment that compares how young gay men across three Sinophone societies deal with coming out (chapter 2), building a community (chapter 3), fulfilling their sexual and romantic desires (chapter 4), and responding to the volatility of the evolving geopolitical contexts (chapter 5). Kong's discussion of the interplay between the state, civil society, and the market is always nuanced, providing a range of illuminating stories about the ebb and flow of queer urban life in these East Asian cities.The study extends the findings from his earlier work on queer Chinese communities, such as the way gay men—still obsessed with the discourse of suzhi (quality)—face progressively tightened censorship by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and narrowing space for activist work in the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the aftermath of the reform era. But above all, the reorientation in Hong Kong gay men's experience is most astonishing. Many queer Hong Kongers moved from embracing a consumer-oriented queer citizenship to embodying “protest citizenship” (112), in which political affinity (especially in terms of being for or against CCP rule) has come to increasingly mediate their sexual identification. Of course, the Umbrella movement (2014), the protests against the Extradition Law Amendment Bill (2019), and the introduction of a Beijing-imposed national security law (2020) all played a role in shaping this transformation, which speaks directly to the book's focus on “the rise of China.”The common denominator of the three case studies, according to Kong, is a novel approach that he calls “transnational queer sociology,” which decenters the West, bridges universal and local understandings of sexuality, and engages the social sciences (especially sociology) with queer theory (9). This is a laudable ambition. At the same time, several challenges emerge from the book for me. First, it is not always clear what is genuinely “transnational” about the study. Since the three sites selected—Taipei, Hong Kong, and Shanghai—are all cities, the scaling up from this level to generalizations about “nations” or “nationalism” requires further justification. Treating the three places in such an egalitarian move can be considered bold and radical. But Hong Kong, of course, stands out as the most obvious exception. Perhaps “transregionalism” would have been a better descriptor. Yet even so, the larger question remains: Why is Chineseness serving as the pivot of comparison across these three sites? This question is never explained in depth. The conclusion instead uses these three case studies to problematize Chineseness and queerness (169), a task that queer Sinophone critics started over a decade ago precisely to unsettle the “Greater China” framework that previous generations of area studies scholars tended to employ to study Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China together.Many of us who work on queer Asia have long implemented a transnational approach in one way or another. Thus, the question of what is, indeed, transnational about this study is crucial for distinguishing its intervention. Alvin Wong's “minor transnational” approach to queer Hong Kong, finding alternative alliances and solidarities with unexpected regions, resembles some of the most creative ways for thinking about queer transnationalism today. A related issue is the way that the book often conflates “transnational” with “comparative,” because the three sites have been selected for the purpose of mostly comparing their similarities and differences rather than probing their connections and interreferencing. In chapter 3, for instance, the expression of frustration by gay men in Shanghai due to the lack of political activism/space echoes the growing discontent voiced by sexual minorities in Hong Kong. Similarly, the way that some Taiwanese gay men aspire to become a wanghong (influencer) is a direct citation of web celebrities in the PRC on gay apps such as Blued. And of course, cross-national consumption is not limited to Hong Kong queers: it is a phenomenon frequently found in gay circles from both Taiwan and mainland China.My biggest reservation lies in chapter 5, where Kong delineates the three Sinophone societies according to different characteristics—even gradations—of homonationalism. First proposed by Jasbir Puar to condemn the imperialist project and neoliberal logic of the United States, the theory of homonationalism relies on the liability of an assumed sexual hierarchy within queer communities. Critically missing from Kong's study but central to Puar's original formulation is the angle of race: all of Kong's subjects are Han Chinese, and yet this problematic racialization does not figure in Kong's homonationalist analysis. This prompts the question: Has Kong's research controlled for race/ethnicity or failed to account for this variable?In Taiwan, a country that has become increasingly multicultural with opportunities of participatory democracy for Indigenous and migrant people, Kong's discussion hinges on a demarcation of the “good gays” from the “bad gays,” but this is a flattened binary emanating from the rhetoric of self-proclaimed anti-statist “leftists.” The work of Wen Liu, Ying-Chao Kao, and Adam Chen-Dedman, among others, has richly demonstrated the reductive and decontextualized nature of this false opposition in the history of Taiwan's tongzhi movement. Transplanting the leftist critique of the “good gays” and their homonationalism to Taiwan, Kong's grasp of the state and government lacks complexity. One wonders, for instance, according to Kong's reasoning, if the only way for Taiwan not to be homonationalist is to keep same-sex marriage illegal. This heavily distorted picture fails to mention that the activists pursuing civil partnership rights have always imagined a much wider set of social transformations, of which gay marriage forms only a very small part. It is as if the “good gays” can only be so ignorant of the potential for transforming the very meaning of marriage, civil union, and human intimacy and, accordingly, its capacity to decouple their public understandings from the hegemonic scripts of heteronormativity. Even Kong concedes that the Chinese state “tolerates certain (mainly suzhi) gay men and lesbians” (147), and how this purported “pragmatic homonationalism” differs from what he calls Taiwan's “incorporative homonationalism” remains fuzzy and open to debate. Similarly, in what ways Hong Kong represents a case of “failed homonationalism” is unclear to me since state and individual actors in the Special Administrative Region have rarely articulated a vision of “national” sovereignty in the way that their counterparts in China or Taiwan do.Before picking up this book, I was hoping that it would not just be a transplant of Lisa Duggan, Lauren Berlant, and Jasbir Puar. After reading this book, I detect a pattern found in most books on queer China published by Duke University Press: a highly skewed narrative that Anglophone readers might find intellectually savvy (because all the right Duke terms are there: homonormativity, cruel optimism, and homonationalism), but by recentering theories concerned first and foremost with American society, it betrays the alleged effort to decolonize non-Western sexuality studies. Had Kong continued to investigate London as a site of inquiry as evinced in his earlier work, this book may have been more successfully “transnational” in nature. This is especially so in light of a growing population of the Hong Kong diaspora in the region.

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• Scientific Sex in the Modern World

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-04-26

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• Abundance: Sexuality’s History by Anjali Arondekar (review)

  Journal of the History of Sexuality · 2024-12-09

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• The Cambridge World History of Sexualities

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-04-26

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  Volume II focuses on systems of thought and belief in the history of world sexualities, ranging from early humans to contemporary approaches. Comprising eighteen chapters, this volume opens with a chapter on the evolutionary legacy and then delves into the sexualities of ancient Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome, continuing with pre-modern South Asia, China, and Japan, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Chapters include an examination of sexuality in the religious traditions of Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and also look at more recent approaches, including scientific sex, sexuality in socialism and Marxism, and the intersections between sexuality, feminism, and post-colonialism.

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 1. Trans without Borders: Castration and the Politics of Historical Knowledge

  Leiden University Press eBooks · 2024-11-07

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay outlines the programmatic contours of a new keyword, transtopia, which makes room for different scales of gender transgression that are not always discernible through the Western notion of transgender.The methods of comparative racialization, native diversification, and genealogical furcation 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, I relocate the legibility of eunuchism from transgender to transtopian history.By challenging the modern West as the privileged site of theoretical production, a transtopian hermeneutic directs attention to the web of interrelations forged between historical actors and their con/texts from which transness gains nuance and momentum.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Hide and Seek: Elmer Belt, Agnes, and the Battle over Castration in Transsexual Surgery, 1953–1962

  Bulletin of the history of medicine · 2024-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the 1950s, the idea of sex change increasingly assumed the mainstay of public interest. As psychiatrists and psychologists developed new understandings of gender, the role of surgeons is often overlooked in the early history of sex reassignment. This article explores the work of one such doctor, Elmer Belt, a urologist based in Los Angeles. Between 1953 and 1962, Belt operated on twenty-nine male-to-female patients in the face of ethical and material obstacles. Working closely with Harry Benjamin, Belt developed a surgical technique that transplanted the testes inside the abdomen rather than involving full castration. He became involved in the famous case of Agnes Torres, on which other high-profile scientists based their invention of such seminal concepts as "passing" and "gender identity." Belt's utilization of Agnes as exemplary evidence to support his technique illustrates how and why testicular retention remained a heated topic in the development of transsexual science.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ta-wei Chi

  Princeton University

  10 shared

• Ari Larissa Heinrich

  National Chengchi University

  10 shared

• Alvin K. Wong

  4 shared

• Abhaya M. Dandekar

  University of California, Davis

  3 shared

• Wendy Larson

  1 shared

• Zeb Tortorici

  1 shared

• Shui-yin Sharon Yam

  1 shared

• M. W. Bychowski

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Winner of the Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Book Award from th…
• Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies
• Honorable Mention for the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award in L…
• Winner of the Dartmouth Medal from the American Library Asso…
• Winner of the Best Book in the Humanities Prize from the Int…