Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone

Curator: Erin Y. Huang 

Abstract:

Unruly Comparison examines queerness in Hong Kong through a transdisciplinary analysis of Sinophone literature, cinema, visual culture, and civil society. Moving beyond Eurocentrism in queer theory and China-centrism in area studies, Wong frames Hong Kong as a model for global comparison by theorizing a method of unruly comparison—acknowledging the incommensurability of cultural texts and queer figures across different temporal and spatial locations. Here, unruly comparison positions Hong Kong as an undefinable time-space that troubles historicist, colonial, and China-centric renderings of the city as merely a site of British colonial legacy, Chinese rule, or global capital. By foregrounding the friction, asymmetry, and perverse juxtapositions of unruly comparison of Hong Kong with the Sinophone world, Wong reframes key debates in queer theory and East Asian studies.

Bio:

Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. His research covers Hong Kong literature and cinema, Sinophone studies, queer theory, and transnational feminism. His book Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone is published by Duke University Press in 2025. He has also published in journals such as Gender, Place & Culture, Continuum, Diacritics, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Interventions, and Screen. He also coedited the volume Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies (Routledge, 2020). Alvin is the editor of the journal Continuum and Chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies (3S).