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Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies .

ultimate tragedy to avoid.Disability rights and practices could be mobilized as political tools to advocate for a just and clean environment for all.
My own PhD research focuses on the ethics of early detection and intervention for young autistic children.Feminist, Queer, Crip made me acutely aware of the curative imaginary in these early clinical programs for autism.Detecting early autism characteristics comes down to noticing whether the child develops the right skills at the right moment in time, compared to the 'normal' temporal schedule of development.Early interventions are acclaimed to offer better odds at living well in the future on the condition they are offered timely during the right window of opportunity, i.e. in the first years of life at times of heightened neuroplasticity.
Fortunately, most of the autism research communities have become aware that the ambition to cure autism is long past its expiration date.However, my interpretation is that it is still difficult in the early intervention literature, if not impossible, to imagine a flourishing future for autistic children; at least not without deploying clinical interventions.
Yet, doing away entirely with any kind of interventions might be no viable option either.By interviewing autistic adolescents and parents of autistic infants I came to understand that their real-life difficulties and experienced injustices invoke a societal responsibility to care and to act.As Kafer puts it: 'The task, then, is not so much to refuse the future as to imagine disability and disability futures otherwise, as part of other, alternate temporalities that do not cast disabled people out of time, as the sign of the future of no future.' (p. 34) A potential way forward is that exactly these early interventions become spaces of political possibility.In this vein, my colleagues and I are developing a series of workshops for parents of young autistic children.The goal for parents here will be to arrive at a critical awareness of their situationality: how to understand autism as a phenomenon?How to engage as a parent with their autistic child beyond the role of developmental therapist-by-proxy?Through mutual deliberation with one another, and by bringing in autistic people and neurodiversity advocates into the discussions, we hope to shape a space where parents can speculate on their autistic child's future beyond a curative imaginary.In other words, early interventions could become spaces where autism futurity can be cripped.

Gert-Jan Vanaken
Gert-Jan Vanaken is a medical doctor and a PhD candidate at KU Leuven and University of Antwerp.Out of academia, he works as an environmental justice and degrowth activist.At the time of writing Vanaken experiences some health issues, but identifies as able-bodied and neurotypical.In No Ordinary Doubt, Patricia Friedrich studies the rhetoric of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), its social-cultural milieu, and its historical antecedents with the use of literary and linguistic analysis.She argues that the discourse on OCD remains one of 'otherness, of detachment, of seeing the person living with OCD as different from oneself ' (p. 23).This otherness, which may be the result of social mechanisms and the perception as well as the medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation of mental illness, challenges not only diagnosis and adequate, custom treatment, but also−and perhaps most importantly−inclusion and a sense of belonging.
By examining OCD as a social phenomenon rather than a disorder, Friedrich suggests, similar to insights from Disability Studies, that we can come to realise that '"difference exists, that it may not be possible to suppress it, and, more importantly still, that it might not be 'right ' (i.e., ethical, respectful, kind, just) to try to repress it ' (p. 25).It should be emphasised, however, that considering OCD a social phenomenon does not deny the difficulties that may come with it.Friedrich's departure from a social account allows her to address the topic of representation in literature and its ability to convey through e.g., visual and verbal expression that which is otherwise difficult to explain.As such, she aims to add a social dimension to a phenomenon that remains to this day predominantly studied from a medical point of view, which contributes to the construction of so-called 'sufferers' of OCD or, similarly, any other (develop)mental difference as 'deficient and disabled, as opposed to alternatively gifted and able ' (p. 26).
The work consists of several chapters, each dealing with a specific topic such as the power of discourse, the misappropriation of OCD for humour, and a chapter titled Not 'Just' a Story.Here, Friedrich investigates the literary representation of OCD in works such as David Copperfield and Macbeth among some lesser-known titles.She departs from the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's concept of 'single story' to call for the representation of 'the richness and diversity of human experience' (p.147), which a single story fails to portray.A frequently featured narrative of OCD concerns a character that 'becomes consumed with […] the pursuit of a particular goal' after a financial or emotional blow (p.148).Contrastingly, Friedrich advocates for a reinterpretation of OCD to make sense of and bring meaning to the experience and 'overwhelming feelings of doubt, guilt, and lack of control that often accompany it' (p.149).
However, Friedrich warns for the side-effect of downplaying the significant role that OCD or other (develop)mental differences may play throughout people's lives.In this context, she asks a question that seems most important to me while doing research in this field: how does one convey that OCs (people affected by OCD), and by extension all (develop)mentally different or neurodivergent people, are just like everyone else, without making their challenges disappear from the collective consciousness?One way of achieving this might be (highlighting) the natural portrayal of neurodivergence as 'part of a bigger picture in which different emotions, experiences, and people circulate' (p.166).According to Friedrich, literature can be of help here because it functions as the ultimate means to insert neurodivergence into the fabric of everyday life.
Answering Friedrich's call for a reinterpretation of OCD and, I add, other (develop)mental differences, I attempt to access the first-person experience of such differences by studying alternative patterns of language, style, and narrativity in literary texts through the lens of neurodiversity.In essence, this view holds the idea that disease-based labels such as Autism Spectrum Disorder, AD(H)D (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), and dyslexia (or in German: reading-and-writing-weakness) should not be understood as disorders, but as a wide neurobiological diversity parallel to e.g., biodiversity and gender diversity.In my research, I put forward the hypothesis that through literary analysis, neurodiversity can be shown to manifest as an extremely rich perceptiveness or acuity of the senses and thus involves a heightened form of empathy rather than the nowadays prevailing pathology.
In a similar spirit to Friedrich's, the internationally renowned South-African author Antjie Krog emphasised the importance of empathy through literature during her inaugural speech on October 5 th 2021 at the dawn of her writer's residence at Ghent University: 'I shudder at the thought that enormous power is given or grabbed by people who never lived the lifechanging experience of becoming somebody or something else through literature, who [have] never had [their] egotistic, vain, self-sufficient, closed-off self-broadened into a fuller humanity [through reading].[…] Becoming humane is best achieved through literature.Literature assists us to listen along the many joints of this world.' 1 Empathy with the first-person experience of neurodiversity expressed in literary works may expand and elucidate fictional issues, which represent real-life topics 'that we had not thought of before reading these narratives' (p.182).Without forgetting the individual nature of (develop)mental differences and their implications, sharing experiences with the characters might lead us to extrapolate those experiences as our own, and may ultimately help establish the connection that our hyper-connected world, paradoxically, all too often lacks.

Liselotte Van der Gucht
Liselotte Van der Gucht studies English and German Linguistics and Literature at Ghent University and at the University of Bayreuth.She is currently doing a PhD research on neurodiversity in 20 th -century German and Austrian literature (FWO grant number: 1128122N).She mainly focuses on alternative patterns of language, style, and narrativity through the lens of neurophenomenology.

Manion, J. (2020). Female husbands: A trans history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
With Female Husbands: A Trans History (2020), the American historian Jen Manion investigates the historical constructions of gender and sexuality by focusing on the changing meaning of a particular category of gender-crossers.The title, Female Husbands, refers to people who lived in the UK and US between the mid-18 th century and World War I, and who 'transed' the female gender they were assigned at birth, by taking up life as a man and by marrying a woman.By studying a diversity of source materials, such as UK and US newspaper articles, novels, and police reports, Manion aims to chart the various, dynamic representations of these historical figures.While the subtitle might suggest an interpretation of 'female husbands' as a transgender identity category, the book itself understands gender as a dynamic, performative act rather than a fixed identity.Instead of calling the husbands 'trans', Manion transforms the term into an active verb, following Susan Stryker's (2017) definition of 'transing' as any movement away from the gender one was assigned at birth. 2 As a result, Manion is able to overcome the cultural and historical specificities of contemporary terminology.
For female husbands themselves, the 'transing' of gender can have various and multiple motivations, ranging from a personal identification with a certain gender, to economic reasons, gaining greater geographic mobility, or the wish to marry a female partner.In Manion's view, however, the search for individual feelings or motivations is a futile effort.More interesting to her are the perceptions of others, as these offer us insight into historical discourses on gender boundaries.Striking are the various interpretations made of these people's lives throughout history.For instance, the life of 'female husband' James Howe was subsequently read as an  2017).Transgender history: The roots of today's revolution (2nd ed.).New York: Basic Books.example to promote respectable manhood in marriage in eighteenth century UK, a heroic tale of hard work and personal advancement in the early US republic, while the upcoming sexology discourse in the late nineteenth century re-interpreted Howe as a fraud hiding their so-called 'true sex'.
In my own research on transgender narratives in modern and contemporary Dutch literary fiction, I give a similar overview of ways in which 'transing' characters are interpreted throughout different time periods and in changing discursive contexts.The characters in the work of Andreas Burnier, for example, were originally perceived as subversive, feminist gendercrossers, and they now tend to be reimagined as trans characters, whose 'gender trouble' has more to do with personal identification.Manion's monograph makes clear that constructions of gender and sexuality and social categories in general become visible at the crossing of boundaries.As such, a focus on historical figures as 'female husbands' can encourage critical reflection on the gendered norms we implicitly attach to legal, social and economic institutions such as marriage.In my view, the book urges us to ask the following question: In which situations does the crossing of gender provoke debate in the here and now?In countries where same-sex marriage has become legal in the last decades, marriage no longer seems a primary locus where binary genders are necessarily stabilised.Instead, debates on gendered bathrooms, intersex people competing in sports, access to trans health care, or the assignment of legal gender might tell us more about current ethical debates on the organization of gender relations.Manion's contribution to trans history is not providing evidence that there have always been people who 'transed' gender but highlighting the different contested terrains for gender stabilization throughout the ages.As such, the study demonstrates that histories of gender variance are not only important for trans or queer studies scholars, but for anyone working on ever-changing meanings and functions of gender relations.

Sven Van den Bossche
Sven Van den Bossche (he/him) is a PhD researcher at the University of Antwerp and Ghent University, working on the intersections of literary studies, (trans)gender studies and queer studies.His FWO-funded project is called "Born in the Wrong Story: An Embodied Approach to Transgender Narratives in Dutch Literary Fiction" and investigates how various transgender identities, trajectories and experiences can be rendered visible through literary techniques, such as metaphors, temporal ordering and narrative voice.In her recent monograph, Contemporary Feminist Life-writing, Jennifer Cooke takes up the task of thinking together a variety of seemingly very different literary textsnovels, non-fiction texts, memoirs -all labelled as 'feminist life-writing'.She identifies what she calls a 'new audacity' (p. 3) in the way female and queer authors use autobiographical material in literary works today.As Cooke convincingly shows, the politics of autobiographical writing are a feminist concern: the ways in which authorship and textual authority are defined often rely on the erasure of female authorship.Autobiographical texts written by women have long been considered as merely personal or confessional as opposed to the self-evident universality of philosophical and literary Tessel Veneboer is a doctoral student in the English department at Ghent University.Her PhD research "The queer potential of fragmentation: sexuality and identity in the work of Kathy Acker" (2020-2024) is funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).Furthermore, we could also interpret the collection as a first answer to a call raised in "Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition" ( 2004), an article of Shu-mei Shih, to explicitly widen the scope for Chinese Studies beyond the standard centred view on the People's Republic of China (PRC) and to include minority groups spread over the world.As Alvin Wong explains in the chapter on Postcoloniality, this includes 'the visuality of South-South, minor-to-minor, and transnational articulations [of queer desire]' (p.62).This attention to minority groups is also present in Nathan H. Madson's chapter on Activism.He points out how the divide between expatriates, among others, and local Cantonese speakers automatically excludes and renders invisible a large group of 'ethnic minorities, recent migrants from mainland China or Taiwan, and domestic workers from Indonesia and the Philippines ' (p. 206).He shows the necessity of breaking open the concept of 'locality' and look at all different queer communities within Hong Kong, not just those who are visible in mainstream media.
For an upcoming scholar and PhD student interested in the field of Queer Sinophone Studies, Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies and its prequel have become of indispensable value.Different keywords are summed and further elaborated upon through the work's collection of different essays.The topics range from 'postcoloniality' to 'ethnicity' to 'fandom' and 'activism'.The aim of Keywords is to solidify the relation between queer theory and Sinophone studies, as they both challenge 'the doxa and hegemony of binary thinking, essentialism, and disciplinarity' (p.3).When it comes down to queerness, the authors constantly re-emphasise that this is not only a matter of the LGBTQIA+ community, but that this needs to be 'understood as inclusive of any practices or identities that deviate from the linear trajectory of normative social practices' (Shernuk, p. 91).
In my own research, I am particularly interested in Hong Kong activism and its visual culture.As Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region in China and, following the handover from British colonial powers to China, a postcolonial area, it is crucial to note how Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies moves away from the typical China-centric stand (as demonstrated by Alvin Wong) towards a more 'subversive geopolitical […] region situated at the intersections of British postcolonialism and the PRC's growing global dominance' (Howard Chiang, p. 221).Hong Kong is a very atypical example of postcolonialism, and I would like to argue that its position goes beyond 'a culture of disappearance' as phrased by Ackbar Abbas in Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997).Looking at Hong Kong from a transnational perspective has the potential to create new methods, queer methods, of and make new relations between different regions, such as the South-South connections between Hong Kong and Argentina, as shown in Wong Kar Wai's film Happy Together (1997).
In the case of my research on Hong Kong activism and visual culture, this can be applied to the creation of zines and the way they're instrumental to building a community that goes beyond the exclusion of queer people.By making use of similar minor transnational relations, it is possible to link activism in Hong Kong to other areas such as Thailand, Myanmar, and even the #BlackLivesMatter movement.Here, I look at the parallel spaces between activist and queer communities when it comes down to writing zines, as there are often overlapping topics.I also look at the other side and how there are sometimes no intersections, as is the case in a lot of Hong Kong cultural production.
It is clear that Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies is of great importance for my own research, but the book also holds a ground-breaking position within the larger field of Chinese studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.The collection is a critical reading of different media (i.e.books, films and legal studies), it introduces new conceptualisations and approaches.Alongside this, Keywords is of essential importance for anyone working in the domains of postcolonial studies or queer studies, as it offers research from a too often neglected field.

Kika W. L. Van Robays
Kika W. L. Van Robays holds a Master in Eastern Languages and Cultures (Ghent University) and a Master in Gender and Diversity (Interuniversity Belgium).She is currently a PhD Fellow at the department of Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is looking into the interrelations of cultural production, in particular zines, at the intersection of activism and queer communities.Her research interests are in the field of sinology, gender studies, queer studies, media studies, and queer sinophone studies.
Keywords in Queer SinophoneStudies (2021), a new collection of different essays edited by Chiang and Wong, is the welcome follow-up work of Queer Sinophone Cultures (2017), a volume edited by Chiang and Heinrich.Together these two edited volumes lay out the fundamentals for what is now called Queer Sinophone studies.In an earlier review, Yahia Ma (2021) already summarised the status of both these books:If Queer Sinophone Cultures co-edited by Howard Chiang and Ari Larissa Heinrich imaginatively advanced Sinophone studies and queer studies by expansively encompassing the minoritized Sinophone world, Keywords attempts to reclaim the field of queer Sinophone studies and reconceptualise the transdisciplinary, transnational, transcultural conflux and kinship between queerness and Sinophone studies.3